Small Bodies of the Solar System - Professor Carolin Crawford
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 7 มิ.ย. 2024
- Professor Crawford discusses the history and future of our understanding of small solar bodies: www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and...
2015 is a momentous year for the study of dwarf planets - the Dawn mission arrives at Ceres in the asteroid belt in February, and the New Horizons spaceprobe will commence its flypast of Pluto and its moons in July. We shall discuss the smaller bodies of the Solar System - from dwarf planets to asteroids.
The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website: www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and...
Gresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available for free download from our website. There are currently over 1,700 lectures free to access or download from the website.
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Glad to see my asteroid discovery movie being used to educate people.
That's awesome. I also saw this movie used a few months ago by one of my science follows too. It's a great vid.
Thanks! Even though I knew the rate of asteroid discoveries, after I saw this video, I had a much more visceral understanding. Very impressive, imaginative and convincing - congratulations!
Great to see a clip from you pop up in an lecture. When she started talking about asteroids I was immediately reminded of your video, and so was Professor Crawford it seems :).
I have learned more from Professor Carolin Crawford than from any other astronomer. She's a wealth of information and understanding.
This was great! I've become a huge fan of this series. I've gone back and watched the rest. Thank you so much for this absolutely excellent series.
This lady is the clearest expositor of astronomical science anywhere around, and she completely eschews substituting childish portrayals for actual attempts to explicate the science. What a wonderful gift to us all!!!
Fabulous presentation. Interesting, informative and well done. Lovely accent.
She is terrific!
Thank you Carolin for your knowledge, I wish I could see your last lecture in London next month.
Was impressed, learned, and enjoyed. Thanks
Thank you another great talk i learn something new every time !!! cheers Mike
interesting as always.
As usual, the professor easily tops all the other presentations on the topic she selects. All are both more comprehensive and more explanatory, which is not just amazing, but seemingly irreconcilable. I suppose that comes down to how to organize thinking on a topic. I am currently finding these small objects more interesting than the well known big ones, because they are more mysterious.
It appears that Jupiter is the organizer of the rest of the solar system. Coincidentally, or not, Jupiter is the master god in the ancient Roman religion.
Astronomy tends not to get any deeper into physics than strictly required, so I got the idea that planets were round because gravity tended to assemble objects statistically equally from all directions. This is discredited by smaller objects not being very round, although they do seem to be rounded off. What happens on planets like earth is that the weight of the outer 20 miles or so creates pressure on the matter below which is higher than the strength of the materials, after which the matter acts like an immensely viscous fluid. So below some depth the matter is like a droplet that is pulled into a sphere by gravity. If there are different materials, they stratify into layers. At less depth, the matter can be very irregular, until the height of the irregularity crushes the base or makes it flow. On Earth, because of the presence of bound water which weakens rock, this dictates that the height of mountains should not be more than about 5 miles. (Venus has far higher mountains.)
At 50:41 (or about), there's a graphic with all the dwarf planets. There's a typographical error in the spelling of Haumea's larger moon. It should be spelled Hi'iaka, not Hi'aka. (I don't know how to type the backwards apostrophe, common in the Hawaiian language. I also wonder why Salacia wasn't included. Otherwise, I thought this was fantastic.
Seeing the amount of rocky objects crossing earth's orbit, I am truly worried now after this lecture.... I never thought there would be so many on a possible collision course with us.
Its my understanding that the Grand Tack has something to do with which types of asteroids are where. Which to me is fascinating.
Oops. She just touched on it.
Only a committee could come up with the idea that a dwarf planet isn't a planet. Presumably also a dwarf rabbit isn't a rabbit and a dwarf bean isn't a bean, and so on, because once you apply an adjective to a noun, the noun no longer is the thing it was. Is Peter Dinklage a human being, or a dwarf?
Hmmm.
It really would be much easier to just say everything round and differentiated is a planet, then have subcategories. Pluto has far more in common with terrestrials than with the gas giants, for instance. Earth has pretty much nothing in common with Jupiter other than, ooh, our orbit is "cleared".
What are we going to say when we find a young stellar system with planets similar to our own, but insufficient time to have yet cleared their orbits? No planets? All dwarves?
No one ever said that a "dwarf planet" isn't a "planet", hence the word PLANET in the word "dwarf planet". But will you please explain to me why Pluto's re-categorization from "planet" to "dwarf planet" is considered a "demotion" in the 1st place? The entire controversy over Pluto being a called a "planet" one day & a "dwarf planet" the next is less of a testament to the workings of the world community of astronomers & more of a perfect testament to Freud's ideas on the human obsession with size.
isn't gravity just a bi-product of mass ? Self-contained in all matters atomic makeup? won't the smallest matter, left to its own devises gravitate to other matter ?
POTATO shape with a battered surface ? sounds like a chip or waffles
oh dear, what a difference from the "talk" of talk-shows astronomers...