This slide really confused me of course. I was thinking, how is it that these things are the sizes of soccer fields and such projected to earth, set we can't see them with the naked eye even though we're on Earth. The flaw with this logic is that solid angles are measured from the center of earth, but we're just on the edge. This cleared up the physical intuition I was struggling with for solid angles.
s3kim2018
As the lecture talked about solid angles from different planetary bodies, I was wondering if the light they receive from exoplanets and the surface area the light projects onto the earth's atmosphere is how we determine how big a planet is. I think we can use information like how long it took the light to reach us and the its steradians to make this judgement.
This slide really confused me of course. I was thinking, how is it that these things are the sizes of soccer fields and such projected to earth, set we can't see them with the naked eye even though we're on Earth. The flaw with this logic is that solid angles are measured from the center of earth, but we're just on the edge. This cleared up the physical intuition I was struggling with for solid angles.
As the lecture talked about solid angles from different planetary bodies, I was wondering if the light they receive from exoplanets and the surface area the light projects onto the earth's atmosphere is how we determine how big a planet is. I think we can use information like how long it took the light to reach us and the its steradians to make this judgement.