RE: [asa] Near Starlight Problem; Adam would never see all of Orion's belt?

On Tue, 24 Feb 2009, Jon Tandy wrote:

> Thanks Gordon, this is interesting. I'll look into this some more. I
> assume this is an actual measurement that was done with the Magellanic cloud
> supernova, not just a theoretical idea of a measurement that could be done?

Yes. I first learned of this on this forum a number of years ago from
Glenn Morton. He presented it as a contradiction to Henry Morris's claim
that he would accept distances to stars if they were calculated by
trigonometry.

Gordon Brown (ASA member)
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu [mailto:asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu] On
> Behalf Of gordon brown
> Sent: Monday, February 23, 2009 10:41 PM
> To: asa@calvin.edu
> Subject: RE: [asa] Near Starlight Problem; Adam would never see all of
> Orion's belt?
>
> Jon,
>
> The calculation was based on trigonometry. The supernova lit up the gas
> cloud that surrounded it. At some time after the explosion was seen, say one
> year to make it simple, one could measure in angular measure the radius of
> the sphere that was lit up. The actual length of this radius would be one
> light year. This gives you the length of one side of a right triangle and
> the angle opposite to it. Then, knowing the tangent of that angle, one can
> compute the length of the other leg of the triangle, i.e.
> the distance in light years to the supernova. By light years I would mean
> light years at the time of the explosion. Thus if light traveled faster at
> the time when the explosion occurred, a light year would be a greater
> distance than it is now, and the distance to the star measured, say, in
> kilometers would be greater, and since supposedly light has been slowing
> down subsequently, it would take longer to get here.
>

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Received on Tue Feb 24 21:27:26 2009