Distances: Crash Course Astronomy #25
About | Information | History | Online | Facts | Discovery
How do astronomers make sense out of the vastness of space? How do they study things so far away? Today Phil talks about distances, going back to early astronomy. Ancient Greeks were able to find the size of the Earth, and from that the distance to and the sizes of the Moon and Sun. Once the Earth/Sun distance was found, parallax was used to find the distance to nearby stars, and that was bootstrapped using brightness to determine the distances to much farther stars. -- Table of Contents Ancient Greeks Finding the Size of the Earth 1:07 Earth/Sun Distance Began Our Use of Parallax 5:39 Brightness Relation to Distance 9:07 -- PBS Digital Studios: http://youtube.com/pbsdigitalstudios Follow Phil on Twitter: https://twitter.com/badastronomer Want to find Crash Course elsewhere on the internet? Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/YouTubeCrashCourse Twitter - http://www.twitter.com/TheCrashCourse Tumblr - http://thecrashcourse.tumblr.com Support CrashCourse on Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/crashcourse -- PHOTOS/VIDEOS Lunar Ecplise http://www.slate.com/content/dam/slate/blogs/bad_astronomy/2014/04/15/lunareclipse_partial_apr142014_spica.jpg.CROP.original-original.jpg [credit: Phil Plait] Venus & Mercury [credit: Phil Plait] Venus Transit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34mXua1n_FQ [credit: NASA] Black Drop Venus Transit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_drop_effect#mediaviewer/File:BlackDrop-Venus-Transit.jpg [credit: Wikimedia Commons, H. Raab, Johannes-Kepler-Observatory] New Horizons Approaching Pluto and Charon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Horizons#/media/File:15-011a-NewHorizons-PlutoFlyby-ArtistConcept-14July2015-20150115.jpg [credit: NASA/JHU APL/SwRI/Steve Gribben] Radio Telescopes Diagram http://scitechdaily.com/images/Radio-Telescopes-Settle-Controversy-Over-Distance-to-Pleiades.jpg [credit: Alexandra Angelich, NRAO/AUI/NSF] 61 Cygni https://archive.stsci.edu/cgi-bin/dss_search?v=poss1_red&r=21+06+54.60&d=%2B38+44+44.9&e=J2000&h=30&w=30&f=gif&c=none&fov=NONE&v3= [credit: Caltech / National Geographic Society / STScI] Proxima Centauri https://www.spacetelescope.org/images/potw1343a/ [credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA] Dying Star http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/64884main_image_feature_211_jwfull.jpg [credit: NASA, ESA, HEIC, and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)] Exploding Star http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_1604.html [credit: NASA, ESA, J. Hester, A. Loll (ASU)] Animation of a Variable Star http://www.spacetelescope.org/videos/heic1323j/ [credit: NASA, ESA, M. Kornmesser] Hubble's High-Definition Panoramic View of the Andromeda Galaxy http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2015/02/image/a/ [credit: NASA, ESA, J. Dalcanton, B.F. Williams, and L.C. Johnson (University of Washington), the PHAT team, and R. Gendler]
Comments
-
Wow one of my favorite crash course videos of all time. I wanna learn about this so much right now. Very cool.
-
I love these videos: Its like getting my drivers licence, but in Astronomy!
-
knew tonnes ha
-
Omg I love the Fear and Loathing reference!!! 😸👏🏼
-
ohhhh theirs my kerman friends bob and bill
-
This just made my head hurt.
-
I read some where that a lot of the Greek calculations were off because they assumed the Earth was a perfect sphere, which it is not. It's not flat by any means but it's not perfectly round and that threw off their sums a little bit.
-
Personally I don't think there was enough pressure put on parsecs. A light year is the motion of light travelling a distance over a value of time. Light years, given their time element, are not used as the unit for calculating the distance of distant objects.
Since the parsec is 206264.81 AU, it's a firm distance and is not related to time. -
Wow 😳 I commented this in school hopefully no one will know 😂😂😂
-
Pause it at 4:54 !
:)) -
Thank you very much, Phil Plait and the rest of CrashCourse Astronomy, for making this video! The universe really is big, immense, gigantic, humongous, infinite! That’s great and all, but it really is a big problem for space boomers. I wonder how we will travel to the nearest solar system and deal with those big distances in the future....
-
who remembers watching zooboomfoo
-
I came expecting "these units are this big compared to these things" but all I got was a bunch of new and interesting information about astronomical measurements
-
theories? or facts? sounds like astronomy says whatever and that makes it fact
-
I wonder if, ten years from now, Crash Course will be teaching University level courses in great depth on YouTube... If the demand is high, I hope they will.
-
wow
-
Sir can you imagine the knowledge we Indians had.During the Vedic period Sir, we had knowledge of multi dimensional.universe which the present string theory talks about. I hope you will check it out
-
fuk these ads
-
since parsecs are a distance measurement would that mean Solo and Chewie had to shortcut like crazy-jay(maw cluster slingshot/yes, the black holes) just to make the run in less than 29.1 light years(which is 3.703e+14 km)?
They must be conserving fuel cells badly huh?
11m 21sLenght
9452Rating