Problem 4. The range of human hearing spans an intensity range of one trillion t

Question

Problem 4. The range of human hearing spans an intensity range of one trillion to one, or 1012 :

1. This is a pretty huge range, and we discussed a couple examples of things that span this range in size. The point of this problem is to come up with a couple of your own examples. Go to this interactive web site, http://htwins.net/scale2 that shows examples of objects at different length scales. Give at least two examples of pairs of objects, where one object is a trillion times larger than the other. (Note that you will need to use a browser that supports flash, or watch the youtube video if your browser doesn’t support the interactive version. Also note that the length scale in meters appears in the lower-right-hand corner of the screen.)

Explanation / Answer

1)

Galaxies a trillion times brighter than our Sun were observed by the Spitzer Space Telescope  inside enormous blobs that were first found by visible-light telescopes, located billions of light-years away in ancient galactic structures or filaments, where thousands of young galaxies are clustered together. These large, fuzzy galactic halos are made up of hot hydrogen gas and are about 10 times as large as the galaxies they encompass. Astronomers can see glowing blobs, but they don't know what provides the energy to light them up.

2)

The black hole isn’t just big — it’s monstrously large and almost impossibly bright. This object, some 12.8 billion light years away, is 420 trillion times more luminous and 12 billion times more massive than the sun.

3)

Enormous water reservoir found in space is bigger than 140 trillion earth oceans.

Astronomers have discovered the largest body of water so far known, a reservoir of water floating in space around a ancient distant quasar, holding 140 trillion times the mass of water in the Earth’s oceans.

Remarkably enough, the find was dated as being 12 billion light years away, only 1.6 billion light years farther from the Big Bang.

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