Interesting Inquiries
Hey everyone,
When it comes to the multiple facets of astronomy, my favorite one might just be talking to others about anything and everything astronomy related. I just find it a lot of fun to go in-depth for a random topic that someone was wondering about. Because of this, I think my work at Mesa Community College’s Planetarium is a lot of fun, because for half of the night I am just doing research and math to answer people’s wide-ranging questions. I recently worked there this past Friday, so I thought it’d be interesting to go over some of my favorite questions from the night in this post.
My favorite one was by far, “what if the Moon was replaced by a sphere of cheese of equal size?”. This one took a lot of research to figure out, which is mainly why I found it to be so interesting. To start with, it would immediately and catastrophically change the tides on Earth because the density of cheese is much less than rock, so the mass of the “Cheese Moon” would be very low. Then, because of the heat of the Sun being directly on it, it would begin to melt and crack, causing cheese meteors to rain down on the planet. This would devastate humanity’s population. After a long time, the “Cheese Moon” would eventually either all fall down on the Earth in pieces of cheese, or it would form a “Cheese Ring” that would orbit around the planet.
Another fun question was “what would happen if enough beluga whales to envelop the Sun suddenly teleported into the Sun?”. Now, the answer to this one is exactly the same as a lot of questions relating to the Sun: nothing would happen. The Sun is large enough and powerful enough so that pretty much anything would have no effect on the Sun, including this. On the other hand, the question of “What if the Earth stopped spinning for 1 second before continuing again?” has a different very easy and common answer: everyone dies. We got a lot of very complicated questions during the astronomy nights, but for more than half of them the answer is just that all of humanity is wiped out, usually very quickly.
For today’s picture, it’s a photo I took of the planetarium dome. While we are seating people, I get to control the images projected and the music played. When I took this photo, it was showing a lot of different famous paintings with the dome, and I was playing the themes song for The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker (don’t tell Nintendo).
See you all next week, and take care.
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