Newswise — A new NASA exhibit, called "Here, There, and Everywhere," illustrates how familiar phenomena on Earth and across the Universe are connected by basic physical laws.
The main feature behind this project, known by the acronym of HTE, is a series of spectacular visual comparisons that span from the human scale on Earth to some of the largest structures in the cosmos. The panels in each of the exhibit topics give examples, with explanatory text, of the same physical process occurring on vastly different scales.
"We want to help people explore how interconnected everything in science is," said Kimberly Arcand of the Chandra X-ray Center who leads the HTE project. "By studying the Universe, we are also often learning about important physics here on Earth – and vice versa."
There are six subjects in the HTE exhibit. The topics covered in the exhibit include shadows, wind, electric discharge, bow waves, lensing, and the collisional excitation of atoms.
"Our daily experiences reveal much about how our world works, and thinking about everyday examples helps form our basic understanding of physics," said Patrick Slane, an astrophysicist involved with the project. "This exhibit will help show that these laws of physics have universal relevance."
The HTE exhibit is intended to be informative and engaging for many ages and backgrounds. For those who would like additional information and more context for the material, a new website is being launched:
The first stop for the HTE exhibit will be the Memphis Public Library in Memphis, Tenn., beginning September 1, 2012. From there, the exhibit will travel to about 30 locations from September 2012 through 2015. In addition, a poster-version of HTE is also being made available. To request a set of the free posters for educational use, send an email to [email protected].
HTE has been conceived, designed, and generated by a team at the Chandra X-ray Center, which is part of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. The Chandra X-ray Observatory is NASA's flagship mission for X-ray astronomy and one of the "Great Observatories" along with the Hubble Space Telescope, the Spitzer Space Telescope, and the now de-orbited Compton Gamma Ray Observatory.
NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., manages the Chandra Program for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory controls Chandra's science and flight operations from Cambridge, Mass.
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