Yes, scientists concerned with astronomy are crazy; amazingly crazy, beautifully crazy that is! Did you know that they think that looking for a needle in a haystack is too easy?
OK, I said nut and not needle but let me explain : a nut is round and not a needle hence the change I made to the old saying since a nut is round and so is a planet. A haystack is circular and so is the modern equivalent : the bale. For practical purposes relating to our comparison, we’ll give both as round and proceed. A haystack like those painted by Claude Monet is typically 5 meters high and wide so let us then picture a 5 meter bubble of hay and use millimeters as a unit or 5 000 mm. A hazelnut is 15 millimeters in diameter so that it comes to about 1 770 cubic mm. That is an approximation but we will soon discover that it does not matter in the least; let’s press on. We’ll then do the same with our haystack. Its volume in cubic millimeters is 65 449 846 950 or simply put 65.5 billion mm.
65.5 billion to 1 770 gives us a ratio of about 37 million to 1. Even accounting for the lost space between the little nut spheres it comes to nearly 20 million nuts.*
One in 20 million, one in 37 million, whichever, it does give an idea of the length of the process if you have to look for a specific nut.
It is time to veer away from that example and turn to the haystack and nuts in the sky anyway. In our Solar system, mass is more important than volume. The reason for this being that all bodies in it do not share the same density. For instance, the Earth is made mostly of rocks while the much bigger outer planets are mostly made of gas. We all know a soap bubble to be lighter than a similarly sized marble, for instance. The influence of the Solar system’s bodies relative to each other is then computed by mass.** If one computes our Sun to the overall mass of the system named for it, we find that it accounts for 99.86 percent of it. Yes, the planets, all of them but also their respective satellites such as our Moon or those around Jupiter ( all 67 of them !!! ) and the asteroids and even the best known comets, account for less than 15 % of one percent of the whole. Out of these, Jupiter is more than 300 times the mass of the Earth while itself less than a thousandth that of the Sun. Yes, our beautiful globe, that aquarium floating in space is, you read right, 333 ooo times less massive than the central luminary! A million Earths would be the same as only 3 Suns in mass!
You’d think then that it has no effect whatsoever on the Sun. Might mighty Jupiter itself have any? It is after all as we saw less than o.1 % of the Sun’s mass! If we stick to Newton’s fabled falling apple example, maybe not. The Moon for instance, while only 1.23 % of the Earth’s mass does give us tides, does it not? Well first, it mostly affects water which as any fluid is more malleable, easier to deform than rock and only since the Oceans’ mass itself is important enough. Attraction between masses is relative to the combined masses of interacting bodies and inversely proportional to the distance separating them. That explains why astrology’s often cited mantra that it affects humans as we are mostly made of water is so wrong. Yes, we are made of nearly 70% water which is generously equivalent to 70 kg ( assuming you weigh a 100 kg or for the metric-deficient 220 pounds ). The Oceans however “weigh” 140 000 000 000 000 000 000 kg which makes the influence of the Moon on you 2 000 000 000 000 000 000 times lesser as evidence by the absence of tides in normal sized lakes pools and glasses of water for instance. 😎 And yet, both the Moon on the Earth and Jupiter on the Sun ( 10 times more for the latter as mass alone is concerned ) do have an influence. It does not come from mass solely however. For as Einstein spelled out : E=MC2. That means that energy is equal to mass times the speed of light squared. It also means as we turn the equation around that E/M = C2. The speed of light, squared or not, being a constant, not changing, we can safely conclude that the energy imparted to a body affects its mass.
What energy, you may ask? Where from? Angular momentum is its name. When the Solar System coalesced, contracted from a huge space faring gas bubble into its present components, the spinning top at the center, our Sun, lost most of its energy and more or less stopped rotating ( In fact, it kept about 2% of it and does rotate a little. ). Of course it did not fall to the side as a top would have for there is simply no floor for it to fall on its side on. The planets however kept that angular momentum . Just as when, if you spin a bucket fast enough, the centrifugal force presses the water outward and keeps it from splashing you or in swings or carnival rides as the chair spins at the end of a chain. That angular momentum’s energy, in accordance, adds mass to the object subject to it. All in all enough that if combined to a body massive enough it does influence the star at the center of the system. Oh, not much for sure but it does!
So that, under the sort of tidal influence thus provided by the conjunction of mass and angular momentum, the star “wobbles”. Just as the spinning top in its final moments of rotation. Try it at home and look at that top go. An instant prior, it was going around and around but now its upper portion goes out and out until it touches the ground and stops. That kind of sideways motion, that wobble also exists for stars that have circling bodies to them. Not a lot, not a lot at all but since contrarily to the top the stars are not fixed to any ground as we said, their whole axis is affected and they more or less end up moving around their position in space, wobbling!
If stars were rocks, it would be the end of our story but hey, they are not. Stars are great balls of fire.*** As fires do, they emit heat and light! The heat keeps Earth a nice place to live but does not cross the vast distances of the cosmos just as in the night a traveller nearing a campfire sees it long before feeling any warmth off it. Thanks to that light, the night skies are alive with pinpricks of it, little candles in the dark immensity of space. And light as any other wave can transmit signals. Flicked on and off, a flashlight carries morse code for instance. Another feature is that light, again as other waves like sound ones is modified by the position of the emitter; let us see how. When a siren on a police car or ambulance or the horn of train are on, they sound according to the movement of the vehicle. As the train moves fast enough in your direction, the sound waves it emits catch on to those sent right before. You hear a high pitch from that, shorter than if the train was motionless? In reverse fashion as the train moves away from you, the sounds it sends are further and further apart. If it sends a sound per second for instance and gets nearer, each sound comes from less distance and thus are closer together. As it moves further from you, each sound is sent from a greater distance and needs more time than the preceding one to reach you. The result is that in the first case, the pitch is higher and in the second it becomes lower. That is known as the Doppler-Fizeau effect and applies to light as well. If the source of light pulses is getting closer, the higher pitch means that the light tends to shift to shorter waves and turns blue ( shorter light waves ). Inversely, if the source is moving away, the lightwaves turn to the red or longer frequency end of the spectrum.
That has been understood for a long time and most of you probably know that by calculating the red shift, astronomers can compute the speed at which individual stars or even whole galaxies are moving away from our position in the Milky Way, our own galaxy thus proving that the Universe is expanding. Well, lo and behold, the crazy guys ‘n gals that study the stars had the idea to apply that to the wobble. Yes, they thought that, if their instruments were sensitive enough, they could actually record red shifts and blue shifts from the minute oscillations induced in far away suns to find out if these had planets exerting gravitational pulls from that combination of mass and angular momentum we talked about earlier! And they did.
With instruments like the space telescopes we now have orbiting the Earth, not disturbed by changes in the atmosphere and cooled to the lowest temperatures possible in space, near the absolute zero, very small shifts in the spectrum of light reaching us from far away stars have been witnessed. From the amount of the variations and the periodicity of them ( the length of the cycle from red shift to blue shift and back to red shift again ), they measure the characteristic of the bodies that induce them! Incredible, wouldn’t you say?
That is not the crazy part! Here is the crazy part : those stars are far away. Far far far away! And even further than that! 😉
The closest one is Alpha Centauri B. It stands only 4.37 light-years away. How far is that? Well, light in a vacuum moves at nearly 300 000 kilometers per second. A light second would then be a unit of distance ( and not speed ) equal to three hundred thousand kilometers which makes a light-year a distance of about 9.5 trillion kilometers, the distance covered by light in a normal year of the present commonly used Julian calendar and multiplied by 4.37, it places Alpha Centauri B 41 343 392 165 179 kilometers away. Over 41 trillion kilometers that way! 😎
Go West, young man indeed, wouldn’t you say?
[ The farthest one detected as we write and read respectively is 21 500 light-years away if you must ask or roughly 204 250 trillion kilometers from here, by the way! About 5 000 times further? ]
That planet around Alpha Centauri B is most likely 1.1 Earth sizes or practically a twin to our blue globe. If you refer yourselves now to that haystack analogy up at the beginning of this post, we will be able to give a semblance of perspective. The volume of the Solar System is such that it equals nearly 13 quintillion times that of the Earth and not 37 million as in the haystack and nut. About 35 million times as big a haystack? So? Well, the Earth is roughly 40 thousand kilometers around. Suppose you stood with your back pressed at the haystack and look around the planet to it. These astronomers are looking for a hazel nut in 35 million haystacks located 1 billion times further!!! And that’s the closest one?
Whether or not you find that and them crazy, I honestly think it’s time to stop before you and I turn that way; good day all, Tay.
* About the right proportion in a country like the United States but I didn’t say that 😀 !
** Mass, not weight and yes there are cases where diameter, volume and the likes play a role, just not in our example of the day.
*** Thanks Jerry Lee, I’ll listen to it right after I’m finished writing. 😎
Additional reading :
http://planetquest.jpl.nasa.gov/
You can find Alpha Centauri B in the constellation of the Centaurus of course!
And click below or up there on the picture for the website where it comes from.
http://phl.upr.edu/press-releases/aplanetarysystemaroundourneareststarisemerging
And a tool : http://www.mathinary.com/
Definitive Lapse of Reason 
Hi Ryan, glad you liked it! 😀
Thank you David, it allowed me to find your blog which I have a feeling I won’t regret 😉 Tay.
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