MASS

Episode 9 The Lives of the Stars

That was a cool statistic at the beginning. If you cut an apple pie in half, 90 times you'll be down to the size of an atom.

Atoms are mainly empty space. In fact the nucleus of the atom is 1/100,000 the size of the full atom with its electron cloud. Now you know why neutron stars that have a mass several times the Sun and have been crushed down to the size of a city, have such a high density. One of Dan Joyce's favorite quotes is that, "if you drop a marshmallow from eye height, it will hit the surface of a neutron star with the energy of an atomic bomb."

I wonder how many people know the origin of the name of the search engine, Google. It isn't spelled the same but the Googol (10 raised to the power of 100) was the source. I never knew that the name came from a mathematician's 9 year old nephew. For future reference, remember a Googolplex is 10 raised to the googol power.

Speaking of big numbers, I recently seen the the number of stars in the universe has been estimated to be 300 sextillion (3 x 10 to the 23rd power). Carl throws out a couple more with, number of atoms in the human body being 10 to the 28th power), number of elementary particles (protons, neutrons & electrons) in the universe being 10 to the 80th power, and the entire universe packed with neutrons would be 10 to the 128th power.

I thought the observation of the neutrino flux from the 1987 supernova in the Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy was one of the great scientific accomplishments. It was mentioned that astronomers were only finding 1/3 the theoretical flux of neutrinos from the Sun. Subsequently, scientists found that neutrinos can change between 3 flavors, electron, muon and tau. The detectors scientists were using could only detect 1 of the 3 flavors. That's why they were only seeing 1/3 of the neutrinos. I didn't realize that it took until 2001 for scientists to confirm this.