• Question: The person that tells me the coolest fact will win my vote :D

    Asked by jamesagrear to Claire, Kate, Matt, Rob, Sam on 19 Jun 2013. This question was also asked by maddy2468, tdmj.
    • Photo: Sam Geen

      Sam Geen answered on 19 Jun 2013:

      You know what’s the coolest thing in the world? It’s you, jamesagrear. You know it.

      Ahem. A supernova (an exploding star) gives off 10^44 Joules – that’s 100000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 Joules. It would take a microwave oven three billion trillion trillion years to make that much energy. Cooking your dinner on a supernova tends to overdo it, of course, but it doesn’t come out all mushy if you leave it in too long. Well, it sort of vaporises, but you get the idea. Exploding stars have a lot of energy, and don’t take culinary advice from astronomers.

    • Photo: Kate Husband

      Kate Husband answered on 19 Jun 2013:

      If you look at the end of your TV remote with a camera you can see the infrared light it uses to send the signal to the TV! That’s because the camera is sensitive to longer wavelengths of light than our eyes.

    • Photo: Matthew Pankhurst

      Matthew Pankhurst answered on 19 Jun 2013:

      I’m going to tell you a fact about ice – because it’s very cool! Ice is the reason a lot of England looks like it does today. During the last Ice age, about 10,000 years ago or there about, giant ice sheets (I’m talking a couple of kilometers high – a bit bigger than you get in winter nowadays!) covered most of Britain. The enormous weight of the ice pushed down on the land and as it slowly moved towards the sea (just like normal rivers, only slower) it scraped away whole mountain sides. What you end up with is U shaped valleys in the north of England. In the south, where these sheets of ice finally warmed up and melted, all the bits of rock that were carried along at the bottom of the ice and were trapped inside were set free, so they fell out evenly. This is why a lot of the south of England is rolling hills, and the north is pointier! Maybe you can see evidence of ice sheets where you are!?

    • Photo: Claire Lee

      Claire Lee answered on 20 Jun 2013:

      The LHC is colder than outer space, AND hotter than the centre of the sun, at the same time!

      The magnets used to bend the beam around are cooled using liquid helium to 1.9K. The temperature of outer space is 2.73 K (the temperature of the cosmic microwave background). So the LHC is actually colder than outer space.

      At the same time, when the LHC smashes lead ions together, the collisions reach temperatures of more than 1.6 trillion degrees Celsius, 100,000 times hotter than the temperature at the center of the Sun!

      Also, bonus fun fact – we accelerate protons to energies of 4 TeV. 1 TeV is about the energy of a flying….

      …

      …Mosquito!

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