Space Explorer Issue 1
PLANETARY ORBITS & SKATING! THE PHYSICS IN CELESTIAL BODIES AND OUR OWN
HOW WELL DO YOU KNOW
YOUR NEIGHBOURHOOD?
THE SECRET OF PLANETARY ORBITS ...AND MORE! Black Holes! Wormholes!
DISCOVER THE WONDERS OF OUR COSMIC HOME!
Editors' Word OUR TEAM
meet the space explorer Team! Nourhan Ali
Space Explorer, the magazine for Astronomy Enthusiasts!
Mariam El Tahany
Whether you enjoy astronomy and cosmology as a hobby, or take an academic interest in it, Space Explorer provides you with both the informative and the entertaining on your favorite topic: Space!
Fady Ehab Mansour
Our Mission: We've strived to create a magazine that will appeal to as many fellow enthusiasts as posible one that has something for everyone! With topics varying from did-you-know facts about your closest cosmic neighbours to refreshing insight into the deeper aspects of celestial motion, we've attempted to present these ideas in the lightest, most readable experience possible, to ignite the reader's interest in all things cosmic!
Dina Jereidini
We hope that as fellow lovers of all things cosmological, you will find this issue enjoyable, and feel inspired to go out there into the cosmic world and learn! Sincerely, The Space Explorer team
Space Explorer
Contents 4-7
8-9
10
12
14
16
Do You Know?
The Big Bang Argument
Planetary Orbits & Skating
The Secret of Our Orbits
Black Holes
Wormholes
Have Fun! 19 It's all about Space!
Earth, the lucky planet is the third of our solar system and is located in the Milky Way Galaxy. The solar system is consisted of the planets, the sun, dwarf planets, moons, comets, meteors, an asteroid belt. The sun would be located in the center of our solar system and everything else in the solar system would orbit around it.
T
here are nine planets in which orbit the sun, they are: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto.
Mercury is considered to be the biggest planet in our solar system, and Saturn has large rings orbiting around it. As for Pluto it would be considered the dwarf planet in our system. As mentioned before there are objects in which orbit the sun other than planets, in which include asteroids, comets, meteoroids and dwarf planets.
Asteroids are also however considered minor planets in which are constructed of rocky and metallic objects. They orbit the sun in the asteroid belt that is between Mars and Jupiter. Comets are basically icy bodies that are small in which also orbit the sun. Meteoroids however are small bodies in which travel through space, much smaller than asteroids and are made up of stones and metallic. The Milky Way Galaxy, is a spiral shaped galaxy, in which has our solar system, and that contains about 200 billion stars, however, these stars cannot be seen from earth. The Sun is about 26,000 light-years away from what is considered the center of the Milky Way Galaxy.
By: Nourhan Aly
Planetary Orbits & Skating
M
an's curiosity has always been his true motive to uncover the secrets of the universe.
We are always trying to understand everything about our environment. However, sometimes our anxiety prevents us from realizing the correlation between certain daily motional activities and motion of celestial bodies. Actually, a lot of interesting sports are dependent on physical motional laws, but most of the time we skip the science part because we think it is boring. This is why; we will examine a sport that is based on difficult mechanism of motion such as skating in order to explain the law of motion governing the rotational speed of planets around sun in our own solar system! In skating, we can observe athletes performing extremely fast spins while concentrating their weight on one leg without falling. The interesting part about this sport is that a typical skater can control his rotational speed through stretching and contracting his arms and legs. If we examine more closely the skater's motion, we can see that his speed of motion increases tremendously when he stretches his arms and legs and vice versa. Physicists were able to explain this motion in terms of angular momentum law which is the product of an object's mass, distance of mass from rotational axis and the velocity of rotation.
Then, they explained that the angular momentum of every motional body has to be conserved so, if one of the factors affecting the angular momentum is altered, then it must be matched by a change in another factor. For example, as the skater contracts his arms and legs in the direction of axis of his rotation, he speeds up because angular momentum is always conserved and the velocity of the skater is the compensating factor for the change in distance between his body parts and axis of rotation. Morover, the motion of planets around the sun could be explained through angular momentum as well because their orbit around the sun has the shape of an ellipse.
According to this orbit, the planet is sometimes closer to the sun and sometimes farther away. According to the figure, as the planet moves towards a position that is further away from the sun than any other point, another factor has to decrease such as velocity in order to maintain constant angular momentum. This indicates that the velocity of each planet during its spinning around the sun relies upon the change in distance between the planets and the sun because the angular momentum of planets is always conserved and the mass of the planets is always constant. This conclusion is crucial planetary rule called Kepler's second law.
By Fady Ehab
Content sources
Images
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ComicVine.com
Content PhysicsOfTheUniverse.com "Planets for kids." Planets for kids. N.p.. Web. 12 May 2014. "Planet Facts." . Space Facts, 1 Jan. 2014. Web. 11 May 2014. .
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Astronomy.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 13 May 2014.