Sleepysneezeydopeydoc-blog - Physics Nerd

The best vintage cars, hot rods, and kustoms

☄️A special relativity problem☄️

This problem appeared in one of my tutorial sheets and I thought it would be a nice one to share.

“A rather eccentric group of astronomy students wanted to celebrate the impact of the Shoemaker-Levy comet on Jupiter by holding a party of sufficiently long duration that their celebrations were simultaneous with the impact of the comet in all inertial frames.

For how long did they need to party?  How might the part end?  [The distance from the Earth to Jupiter is 8 x 10^11 m and you may neglect their relative motion].”

“A time sequence of four frames showing the impact of the first of the 20 odd fragments of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 into Jupiter.”

Just basic knowledge of Lorentz transformations is required to solve this 🙂

This question is in fact from Dynamics and Relativity by Gavin Smith and J. R. Forshaw (page 134, problem 6.15). Picture source: NASA.

Video of Gallium reacting with water.

Source: Scienmag

Helix Nebula

Images: NASA, NOAO, ESA, the Hubble Helix Nebula Team, M. Meixner (STScI), and T.A. Rector (NRAO).

Night x

Blue Angels