Week 1, Homework 2

September 2, 2013

1. Between what latitudes are there two summersi.e. two peaks in the temperature throught the yearlike the Nairobi, Kenya example Professor Murayama gave? (a) The only latitude you can have two summers is on the equator (b) Between 13 latitude, i.e. halfway between the Tropic of Capricorn and Tropic of Cancer (d) Between 52 latitude, i.e. between twice the Tropic of Capricorn and Tropic of Cancer 2. The Earth revolves around the Sun at a velocity of 30 km/s. Use this along with the fact that it takes one year (by denition!) to orbit the Sun to nd the distance from Earth to the Sun. In the time it takes light to get from the Sun to the Earth (speed of light: c = 300, 000 km/s) you could: (a) Blink (b) Take a sip of coee (c) Listen to a song or two (d) Watch the entire rst lecture of this course (i.e. all the videos for the rst week) 3. As the Universe expands, it cools. Why? (a) Objects (stars, galaxies, etc) hit each other less often, and therefore have lower kinetic energy and thus a lower temperature (b) Gravitational attraction of objects in the universe (e.g. between galaxies) slows down the expansion by pulling on each other, thus creating a lower temperature (c) The wavelength of light is stretched by the expansion of the universe. Longer wavelength means lower energy, and hence, lower temperature (d) Because the bigger you get, the cooler you are 4. The Earth is 4.6 billion solar years old (1 solar year = time it takes Earth to orbit the Sun). Lets dene a galactic year as the time it takes the solar system to orbit the center of the galaxy. Now imagine our solar system is a person and is having an upcoming birthday in galactic years. What present do you decide to give it? Recall that the Solar System is 28,000 lightyears from the center of the galaxy and rotates it at a velocity of 220 km/s. (a) Its rst pair of shoes since it is just learning to walk ( 2 galactic years) (c) Between 26 latitude, i.e. between the Tropic of Capricorn and Tropic of Cancer

(b) A new computer to use in college ( 20 galactic years) 1

(d) Nothing, because if the solar system were human, itd be as old and gone as Aristotle ( 2300 galactic years) 5. The temperature of space is T = 2.7 K. This temperature comes from energy carried by light in the CMB. The energy that light carries is determined by its wavelength. Using dimensional analysis and three fundamental constants, what wavelength does T = 2.7 K correspond to? The three fundamental constants you will need are Boltzmanns constant kB , Plancks constant h, and the speed of light c. (a) Several meters (b) Several millimeters (c) Several micrometers (d) Several nanonmeters 6. You start walking a straight line on Earth. Assuming Earth as a perfectly smooth sphere and that you continue to always walk in what you perceive as a straight line, you will eventually (a) Eventually come back to where you started having traversed a great circle (a great circle is a circle that goes around the full circumference of a sphere, like the equator or lines of longitude). (b) Eventually come back to where you started having traversed a line of latitude. (c) You would eventually come close to where you started, with the dierence related to the curvature of the sphere (which depends on the radius). (d) It cannot be determined because there is no notion of a straight line on the surface of a sphere. 7. What is the size, i.e. the radius, of a black hole with a mass equal to that of Earth (MEarth = 6 1024 kg)? Give your answer to one signicant gure. 8. Look up where Voyager 1 is now and compute how many light hours it is away. Round your answer to the nearest number of light hours. 9. In the lecture it was shown that the speed of a body on a circular orbit decreased as a function of distance from the object it orbits (e.g. the Sun) as v (r) 1/ r. This followed from Newtons gravitational law GmM F = r2 2 and that for circular motion ma = mv /r. It was discussed how it was discovered that galactic rotation curves are at, i.e. v (r) constant instead of v (r) 1/ r, and this is evidence for dark matter. What is the distribution of dark matter that would lead to such an eect? Let the density of a dark matter halo decrease with r as a power law: ( r ) = a , rn a is a constant

(c) A card congratulating it on being the oldest human alive ( 120 galactic years)

What is the power n that leads to a at rotation curve? To do this, you can replace the mass that the body orbits M with the total mass within the orbit M (r): F = 2 GmM (r) r2

To nd the total mass M (r) within a given radius r, you simply add up all the mass within the volume of a sphere of radius r. This adding up is done by taking an integral of the density within the volume M (r) = (r)dV .