The Royal Institution
Andy uses a carrot gun to discuss the hazards of micrometeoroid impacts in space, showing that at high enough speeds even tiny specks of dust can be dangerous. Why do high energy collisions in space make solid matter behave in a way that’s wholly unfamiliar to us?
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Our piece of equipment fires a carrot at over 300 km per hour. At that speed, the humble carrot can inflict serious damage on anything that gets in its way. And yet that’s just a fraction of the speed of objects in orbit around the Earth. For example, the International Space Station travels 100 times faster, at about 8 km per second.
To understand why moving at such high speeds makes collisions so deadly, we have to consider what matter really is. Andy suggests that matter as we’re familiar with it is really determined by the chemical bonds that holds it together, rather than the atoms and molecules themselves. At extreme speeds, collisions have so much kinetic energy that all of an object’s chemical bonds are likely to be broken, in effect resulting in a high-energy explosion as unbound atoms hurtle out in all directions.
So how do spacecraft protect themselves from these superfast threats? One approach is to use a Whipple shield – two layers of shield separated by a gap.
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Still waiting on antibubbles haha!
AL YOU MIN EEE UMM
OR
AHH LOO MIN NUM
0:35 you went to all the hussle to prove "Anything could be dangerous if it's going fast enough, even a carrot" who didn't know this? Even my dog knows this, literally.
I love the fact that somebody finally built a carrot gun
Energy = mas x velocity squared. Simple so when you increase the velocity you can decrease the mass and still keep the amount of energy you get from a collision. So that explains why a small grain of space dust traveling and 20,000 kilometers a second can be so dangerous to anything in space.
RI Christmas Lectures have fascinated me since I was a kid – love the effort these guys put into firing children's imagination. Have you just got back of a skiing holiday, Andy?
Did you just stick the carrot in a bike pump and wait until the pressure is high enough to blow it out?
I
NEED
A
CARROT
GUN !!
It’s like spaced armor on tanks
Thank u whipple shield…
My girl keeps carrots in the drawer for some reason.
Do you think we are thick?!
This is good – really good.
Thanks guys.
A light bulb please🤣 if I flicked one with my finger it would shatter🖕
What happens when impacts get even faster? Like 10% the speed of light. Then what happens?
carrots generally have alot more mass then your average micro meteorite
Can you can debunk the flat earth? . then maby this video make sense .
Curious to know how they got that ball moving so fast ?
Huh? I just came here for the carrot gun…
when were we outside of low earth orbit?
I didn't know the thing with the spacing was called that.
The video is cool! May I know the song you used at 01:00?
Why is he recording at the same place that Linus tech tips does?
The thing is I'm pretty sure at a certain magnitude of scale the gravity of the Earth doesn't affect the microscopic body enough to overcome the resistance in the atmosphere and relate to an accelerating velocity in it's motion. Therefore you could never get something so small to such speeds even as a projectile, unless you could control the whole environment and exist within a vacuum itself.
What a joke that we could stop anything of speed in space. The vacuum of space would annihilate the space station long before 1 second heel of the so called shield