Fred Steeves
17th November 2011, 22:32
Hi everybody, I know a lot more about science now than the average guy on the street, but with the company I keep here I'm a mere babe in swaddling clothes on those matters. I want to pick a brain or two on something that's been bothering me.
Every now and then I'll come across a show describing how astronomers are hunting for distant earth like planets by aiming their telescopes on a given star, and then watching for a potential planet's orbit to reveal it's presence by moving in between the star and the observer. Sounds like a winner, except for one thing: What if the orbit doesn't take the planet in that in between path? Is it really that hit and miss? It can't be...Can it?
It seems to me the whole thing is presented to us in the same fashion as our little solar system here, with the planets all in a nice little orbital line, and if you were entering from elsewhere you would naturally pass them one by one as you made your way towards the sun, right? Well, if you were approaching from a perpindicular direction under that model, you wouldn't pass by any planets at all, would you? You would just go straight to the sun.
In the same manner, whenever we're shown an animation of a craft approaching earth, we always see the beautiful equatorial approach, but what if you were approaching straight towards a pole, wouldn't it look completely different, atleast til you got there and checked out elsewhere?
See what I'm getting at? We're always shown this straight on perspective, like we see daily driving down a road, but me no think it's that way in interstellar space exploration.
Cheers,
Fred
Every now and then I'll come across a show describing how astronomers are hunting for distant earth like planets by aiming their telescopes on a given star, and then watching for a potential planet's orbit to reveal it's presence by moving in between the star and the observer. Sounds like a winner, except for one thing: What if the orbit doesn't take the planet in that in between path? Is it really that hit and miss? It can't be...Can it?
It seems to me the whole thing is presented to us in the same fashion as our little solar system here, with the planets all in a nice little orbital line, and if you were entering from elsewhere you would naturally pass them one by one as you made your way towards the sun, right? Well, if you were approaching from a perpindicular direction under that model, you wouldn't pass by any planets at all, would you? You would just go straight to the sun.
In the same manner, whenever we're shown an animation of a craft approaching earth, we always see the beautiful equatorial approach, but what if you were approaching straight towards a pole, wouldn't it look completely different, atleast til you got there and checked out elsewhere?
See what I'm getting at? We're always shown this straight on perspective, like we see daily driving down a road, but me no think it's that way in interstellar space exploration.
Cheers,
Fred