![]() So it's not a particularly useful unit of distance given that we have to go into mega and kilo quite soon, but it's more as, I say, more historical because of that original way of measuring distances to nearby stars.Ĭhris: If all of the bodies in the universe are in motion because our star is moving around the center of our galaxy, our galaxy is moving around as part of a big cluster of other galaxies, how do we kind of keep track of where everything is? Because presumably it's all changing over time and it's all changing all the time?Ĭarolin: Well now if you think about modern satellites like the gaia satellite who do all this meticulous measurement and motions they actually use a reference frame which is way external to our galaxy. So m87, which was observed by the event horizon telescope, the image of the event horizon around it, that is sixteen mega-parsecs away. So like the center of the Milky Way is eight kilo-parsecs away from us, Andromeda galaxy, our nearest large galaxy, is 800 kilo-parsecs away, but after that, actually we use mega-parsecs, so millions of parsecs. If you want to think about distances in the galaxy we talk about kilo-parsecs, so thousands of parsecs. So parsecs measure distances to stars but they start to get unwieldy before too long. And just to say how small one arc second is, it’s a measure of angular size, that is the size that a pound coin would subtend at a distance of four kilometres. And if that shift against the more distant stars is one arc second an anglicised one arc second then that star is one parsec away. So it's using the method triangulation or parallax, where you look at the way a relatively nearby star is displaced relative to the background when you observe from one side of Earth's orbit and then you know six months and 300 million kilometres later the other side of Earth's orbit. So that was a big faux pas but it's a measure of length, it's three point two six light years or about 31 trillion kilometres and it comes from the way we measure distances to stars. Instead, he was referring to the shorter route he was able to travel by skirting the nearby Maw black hole cluster, thus making the run in under the standard distance, he may have indirectly referred to the speed of his ship here because to be able to go closer to black hole and still be able to get out of its gravitational pull you will need to be able to go faster.Carolin: Well yes that's infamously wrong because the parsec is a measure of length and there Han Solo was using it as a measure of time. Solo was not referring directly to his ship's speed when he made this claim. A parsec is a unit of distance, not time. Han Solo claimed that his Millennium Falcon "made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs". Thus there was a high chance that pilots, weary from the long flight through real space, would crash into an asteroid. It took travelers in real space around The Maw (Black hole cluster) leading them to an uninhabitable-but far easier to navigate-area of space called The Pit, which was an asteroid cluster encased in a nebula arm making sensors as well as pilots go virtually blind. Worlds along the Kessel Run included Fwillsving, Randa, Rion, and possibly Zerm. The Kessel Run was an 18-parsec (Roughly 58 Light Years - Wikipedia) route used by smugglers to move glitterstim spice from Kessel to an area south of the Si'Klaata Cluster without getting caught by the Imperial ships that were guarding the movement of spice from Kessel's mines.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |