10 misconceptions about space you shouldn't believe

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

In the next issue, we will debunk the myths about diamond planets, sobriety on the ISS, the twin brother of the Sun and more.

1. There is a giant diamond planet in space

In selections and videos on the subject of space, the "incredible planet-diamond" constantly flashes. This is 55 Cancri e, or Janssen, as it is also called. It is located about 40 light years from us. The planet belongs to the super-earth class and consists of graphite and various silicates.

55 Cancri e is called the diamond planet, because the carbon in it has turned into a diamond due to the intense heat and high pressure. And it makes up a third of the total mass of the celestial body. This gem is twice the size of Earth, eight times heavier, and costs about $ 26.9 nonillion (a number with 30 zeroes)!

Sounds impressive, right? The problem is that the diamond planet is a newspaper duck.

First, it is wrong to imagine 55 Cancri e as a huge diamond circling in space. If this gem is on it, then it is located deep in the crust of the planet. Secondly, the fact that the planet is made of diamonds was invented by the authors of news articles.

In the original 55 Cancri e study, scientists modestly suggested that there was carbon and that diamonds could theoretically form on the planet. And the journalists thought up the precious stone twice the size of the Earth themselves.

In further works, they clarified,, the composition of 55 Cancri e and stated that it was not diamond at all. And in general, it looks more like the rudiment of a gas giant than the Earth.

2. The Earth can be knocked out of orbit or torn apart by a nuclear explosion

Nuclear weapons are terrible things that can lead to disastrous consequences. On the Internet, there are regular speculations about what can be done to our unfortunate planet if the really powerful "Kuz'kina's mother" is undermined. In particularly daring versions, such an explosion can split the Earth into several pieces. Or bring it out of orbit and drop it on the Sun.

The assumption that humanity is capable of moving planets at the current level of technological development is very flattering to pride, but it is wrong.

One enthusiast, using indicators of the speed of the Earth's movement in orbit and its weight, calculated: to drop the Earth on the Sun, you will need to detonate a bomb on it with a capacity of 12,846,500,000,000,000,000 megatons of TNT equivalent. According to rough estimates, there are 14 or 15 thousand warheads in the world with an average of 100 kilotons. That is, the world's nuclear stock is about 15,000 megatons of TNT.

As you can imagine, our desires and our capabilities diverge slightly.

The entire nuclear arsenal of mankind is not enough to inflict any significant damage on the Earth. Well, except to destroy this very humanity. But the planet will somehow survive such a turn.

In general, it is not a fact that this mountain of weapons will be enough to exterminate all people on Earth. Amateurs calculated that even if everything that could explode was blown up, most of the human population would survive, although it would return to the Middle Ages.

For that matter, the pressure of the solar wind moves the Earth a few centimeters in orbit every day. All these 15,000 warheads would have moved it about that much. On a cosmic scale, this is such a small thing.

By the way, once the physicist Randall Munroe calculated how many asteroids from the novel "The Little Prince" by Antoine de Saint-Exupery would be required to accelerate the Earth's rotation by 0.8 milliseconds. It turns out that it must be a meteor shower with a density of 50,000 asteroids per second.

This thought experiment killed seven billion people on Earth, plus four billion Little Princes per day.

And once more, a smaller planet, Theia, crashed into the Earth (though there was no life on it then). The poor fellow was blown to shreds, a piece of it remained sticking out in the core of the Earth, but the latter did not even decide to change the orbit. True, the result was the Moon accidentally.

3. All astronauts are absolute teetotalers

In the mass consciousness, people flying into space are demigods with perfect health and excellent physical shape. Naturally, such supermen do not use anything stronger than kefir and generally for a healthy lifestyle.

Indeed, alcoholic beverages are officially banned aboard the ISS. However, in fact, as admitted by NASA astronaut Clayton Anderson, booze is present there.

It is transported by both the Americans and the Russians - moreover, both NASA and Roscosmos know about this, but do not pay attention to the smuggling. Sometimes astronauts even hide bottles of alcohol in perforated books or fill it in packets of juice.

By the way, in contrast to what was shown in the films "Gravity" and "Armageddon": in orbit they prefer not vodka, but cognac.

At the Mir station they also drank: according to cosmonauts Alexander Lazutkin and Alexander Poleshchuk, they hid brandy there, and also quite officially drank eleutherococcal tincture.

Naturally, no one gets too drunk in space - it's just dangerous. But they allow themselves a little alcohol - to relieve stress.

4. The phases of the moon depend on the shadow of the earth

We all know that the moon is full, growing or waning. They explain the changes in its appearance by the fact that the shadow of the Earth at different times falls on it in different ways. Sounds logical, doesn't it?

But in reality, the phases of the moon do not depend on the earth's shadow. Like our planet, the Moon is illuminated by M. Ya. Marov, W. T. Huntress, "Soviet robots in the solar system: technologies and discoveries" / "Fizmatlit" by the Sun only half - it also has day and night. True, they last there for 14 Earth days and 18 hours.

Due to the lack of atmosphere during the day on the moon, by the way, it is quite warm - 117 ° C, and at night frosts - up to −173 ° C. So the Apollo had to fly there early in the morning, before it was very hot.

In general, the phases of the moon change due to the shadow of the satellite itself. On that half of it that we see, it is day, and on the other - night.

The shadow of the Earth, by the way, also falls on the Moon, but not so often - from two to four times a year. The result is a lunar eclipse.

5. Spaceships get hot during descent because they rub against the atmosphere

When the spacecraft descent vehicles land, they are seen to be burnt and covered in soot. During the process, the capsules are sometimes heated to 1,100 ° C and are protected from destruction by refractory coatings called ablative heat shields.

If a person who is slightly interested in space is asked why this is happening, he will most likely answer that the ship, when descending, rubs against the Earth's atmosphere. Or the atmosphere up there is very hot - after all, the Sun is closer. But neither answer is correct.

At the height of the mesosphere, the temperature fluctuates in The Mesosphere from 0 ° C to -90 ° C, and in the thermosphere, ultraviolet radiation from the Sun can increase it up to 2,000 ° C. But there are not enough air molecules for effective heat exchange, so this is definitely not the reason for the warming up of the descent vehicles.

When rubbing against air, a certain amount of heat is indeed released, but it is not enough to heat the skin.

The process that creates such wild temperatures is called aerodynamic heating. A shock wave arises in front of a rapidly moving ship in the atmosphere, which leads to a sharp compression of the gas. The speed of air molecules decreases, their energy goes from kinetic to heat, so the ablation shield heats up.

Roughly speaking, most of the air molecules "rub" not against the ship, but against each other in a shock wave in front of the ship.

6. Comet tails always trail behind them

We imagine a comet as a red-hot ball that rushes through space and leaves behind a tail of vapor and gas. In principle, the picture is more or less correct. But if you think that the tail is always trailing behind, then you are mistaken.

Comet tails are created by solar wind currents, not friction, as is sometimes incorrectly assumed. There is simply no substance in space that could create this very friction. The solar wind causes the materials that make up the comet to evaporate and carry them away. Since it moves from the Sun, the comet's tail is always directed there. Where the comet is going at the moment is irrelevant.

Therefore, when observing comets from Earth, it sometimes seems that the comet's tail is flying in front of it. This phenomenon is called anti-tail.

At the same time, comets can have two tails - dust and gas. They separate because gas is transported faster by sunlight than particulate matter.

7. The sun is a huge ball of fire

Contrary to what is depicted in popular science books, the Sun is not a ball of flame. It does not burn because combustion is a chemical process involving oxygen. Stars emit light as a result of thermonuclear rather than chemical reactions.

The sun consists of plasma, heated ionized gas - mainly hydrogen, and helium. And it is wrong to call the processes taking place on it combustion.

8. You can fly to space in a hot air balloon

In this video, 17-year-old Toronto enthusiasts Matthew Ho and Asad Muhammad launch a Lego figurine and camera in a makeshift balloon to capture the curvature of the Earth's horizon. Apparently, to use the video as an argument in disputes with flat-earthers.

This is not the only video of this kind on the Internet - a YouTube search for Balloon Flight to Space will find many videos recorded by stratospheric flight enthusiasts.

After watching such records, people who are not knowledgeable in physics can begin to convince others that it is quite possible to get to space in a balloon.

What is really there, this is even shown in the movies.

But in fact, with the help of a balloon, you can climb a maximum of 41 kilometers - this record was set by the balloonist Alan Eustace. Unmanned balloons reached the 53 km mark. Space begins at an altitude of 100 kilometers - this is the so-called Karman line.

You don't need extraordinary knowledge of aerostatics to understand: balloons fly where there is enough air to keep them afloat. And in space with this tension. So you can fly to the stratosphere with a balloon. By the way, aeronaut Felix Baumgartner in 2012 even managed to jump from there with a parachute.

9. The asteroid belt was formed from the disintegrated planet Phaeton

You probably know that there is an asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. More or less large specimens were counted there as many as 285,075 pieces, and they threw every little thing to look at - there are too many of them there. The approximate number is 10 million, but it could easily be more.

There is a theory that a decent planet like this used to circle in place of the belt. But then something happened to her, and only asteroids were left of her.

It has been suggested that it was torn apart by the tidal forces of Jupiter or that a stray planetoid crashed into it. Or maybe the Anunnaki played with nuclear weapons. In general, there was a fifth planet - and it is no longer there. The hypothetical celestial body was called Phaethon, and this name is still found in various pseudo-scientific works.

However, modern research shows, that the chemical composition of asteroids is too diverse and they cannot be formed from one object in any way. In addition, their total mass in the belt barely reaches 4% of the mass of the Moon, which is clearly not enough for the formation of a planet. So absolutely no Phaeton existed.

Asteroids were formed together with the solar system from the remnants of the accretion disk - everything that was not collected in normal planets was left to circle between Mars and Jupiter.

ten. Our Sun has an evil twin brother Nemesis

It so happened that mass extinctions occur on our Earth, and some scientists have managed to discern periodicity in them. Allegedly, every 26 million years, let some living species disappear from the face of the planet - and remember what the name was.

And two independent teams of astronomers - Whitmire and Jackson, as well as Davis, Hut and Mueller - have published studies suggesting the existence of a dwarf star orbiting somewhere outside Pluto's orbit. She was named Nemesis.

From time to time, it changes the orbits of several asteroids in the Oort cloud that came to hand and throws stones at the Earth, killing dinosaurs, mammoths and other trifles swarming on the unfortunate planet. If Nemesis were alive, she would probably giggle ominously at the same time.

This star is periodically mentioned in pseudo-scientific literature along with Nibiru and other mysterious objects.

Nevertheless, further consideration of the hypothesis forced scientists to abandon it. First, the frequency of extinctions was not confirmed: the ancient species, as it turned out, did not disappear regularly, but as luck would have it. Secondly, there are no regularities in the fall of asteroids on the Earth either.

And finally, observations of nothing similar to a star, albeit a dwarf one, either in the visible or in the infrared spectra at the boundaries of the solar system do not record.

So our Sun is definitely a lone star. And this is good.