Monday 11 January 2010

If the stars fell out of the sky, and my tears rolled into the ocean...

Black and Gold by Sam Sparro. I like that song.

Well, here I've sat at my laptop, getting ready for my maths lesson tomorrow. Looking forward to 3 hours of studying tomorrow. Sort of.
I need to buy STAMPS! In order to send some letters away. Gah, why can't I get them online. =(
Anyway, while I was sat on my bed, I came across this AWESOME bit of information. Check it out:

A guy called Kepler came up with 3 laws of planetary motion. The first one is quite by and by,
"The orbit of every planet is an ellipse with the Sun at the focus. "

Which is cool. Planets orbit stars not necessarily in perfectly circular motion but in any form of ellipse, which CAN include circles- circles are after all a form of ellipses.

The SECOND rule is what seemed really cool to me.
"The line joining a planet and the Sun sweeps out equal areas during equal intervals of time."

What does this mean? RIGHT. Let's say we're circulating the sun, right? And over one day we've moved a certain amount around our orbit of the sun. Over any period of it's circulation, the area this planet covers in the course of a day will be the same.

Let this picture aid you:

Assuming that the curved perimeter of the slimmer shaded section is the equivalent of a day, then the curved edge of the thicker shaded area, (which has the same area as the thinner section) is also a day...

So even though the orbit is elliptical the same applies. Essentially meaning that when the planet is closer to the sun, it travels faster around it's orbit.

And Law three is cool though I'm STILL trying to wrap my head around it as I type about it, so forgive any mistakes I make:

"The square of the orbital period of a planet is directly proportional to the cube of the semi-major axis of it's orbit."

Hmmm...


Okay, a bit of background knowledge here. A major axis of an ellipse is the diameter of the longest point in the ellipse. And a semi-major axis is half of that, sort of like the radius if you will, only... not.

So the square of the time it takes a planet to rotate around the sun is equal to the cube of the planet's orbit's semi-major trajectory.

This explains something but by now my brain has gone to mulch because I've seen pictures of the new Prince of Persia game.
Oh, they're moving away from the new prince and going back to the old one. I loved both Princes but I was never as engrossed by another character as I was by the tragedy of Elika. Which is why I was kinda hoping for the new series to carry on for a while... I hope they come back to it.

In all honesty, I was more interested by the second law than I was by the third anyway. The third law is intrinsically connected to:

Which I'm sure is something important.
Theres not much else for me to say at the moment. Have fun working through that. If you have the will to live after all of it, COMMENT! WOOO! Go ON! You can DO IT! I believe in you! Now you believe in yourself!! Go!

2 comments:

  1. :) i love how you jumped from maths to the game ina miliseond. law 2 is cool, but i dont get law 3. your obviously much smarter than me. then again, maybe this just isnt my day.
    still thou, im pleased for you :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. woop! WOOP! Thank you person! =) Who I can't put a face to =(

    ReplyDelete