I was just reading about the ESA's Planck spacecraft, now identified as the coldest object in the universe! Planck is helping scientists with research on Cosmic Microwave Background. Detecting incredibly small variations in temperature is apparently quite important in this endeavor and the instruments are so amazing, someone came up with the following analogy to help us comprehend the magnitude of this particular poetry: it is "comparable to measuring from earth the heat of a rabbit on the moon." Wow! A rabbit on the moon? And if there were TWO rabbits? That might be too much heat for such a sensitive instrument. But it's a lovely image and I'm afraid it might interest me more than the cosmic microwave background itself. I have learned that the universe is so, so unfathomably large that somewhere there is, indeed, a rabbit on a moon. No doubt.
7.07.2009
And the Rabbit Jumped Over the Moon?
I was just reading about the ESA's Planck spacecraft, now identified as the coldest object in the universe! Planck is helping scientists with research on Cosmic Microwave Background. Detecting incredibly small variations in temperature is apparently quite important in this endeavor and the instruments are so amazing, someone came up with the following analogy to help us comprehend the magnitude of this particular poetry: it is "comparable to measuring from earth the heat of a rabbit on the moon." Wow! A rabbit on the moon? And if there were TWO rabbits? That might be too much heat for such a sensitive instrument. But it's a lovely image and I'm afraid it might interest me more than the cosmic microwave background itself. I have learned that the universe is so, so unfathomably large that somewhere there is, indeed, a rabbit on a moon. No doubt.
