Why can't we send a space mission to a star system outside of our own?
What will be an ideal response?
The bottom line is that we just don't have the technology to support this kind of travel. The distances between stars are almost beyond comprehension. The fastest human device ever launched, the New Horizons probe currently on its way to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt, will take about 90,000 years to travel the distance to the nearest star, 4 light-years. The obvious way to overcome these huge distances is with tremendously fast spaceships, but even the closest stars are many light-years away.
Nothing can exceed the speed of light, and accelerating a spaceship close to the speed of light takes huge amounts of energy. Even if you travel slower than light, your rocket would still require massive amounts of fuel. If you wanted to pilot a spaceship with a mass of 100 tons (about the size of a fancy yacht) to the nearest star, and you traveled at half the speed of light so as to arrive in eight years, the trip would require 400 times as much energy as the entire United States consumes in a year. Don't even think about how much fuel the starship Enterprise needs.
These limitations not only make it difficult for humans to leave the Solar System, but they would also make it difficult for aliens to visit Earth.
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The primary reason few SSTs were ever built was because a. SSTs endangered the ozone layer. b. SSTs were not economically viable. c. the technology was risky and the planes likely to disintegrate in flight. d. computers predicted that the bow wave would cause oxygen to recombine with nitrogenin the air
e. SSTs travel through the stratosphere.
By studying the continuous blackbody spectrum from a solid it is possible to deduce the composition of the solid.
Answer the following statement true (T) or false (F)
The largest known black holes
A) can be no bigger than a small city, just like neutron stars. B) can be no bigger than the Earth, like white dwarfs. C) lie in the cores of the most massive galaxies. D) create the dark nebulae in the plane of the Milky Way. E) can be no more than 1.4 solar masses, according to Chandrasekhar.
Which has the greatest effect on the flow of fluid through a pipe? That is, if you made a 10% change in each of the quantities below, which would cause the greatest change in the flow rate?
A) the fluid viscosity B) the length of the pipe C) the pressure difference D) the radius of the pipe E) the fluid density