Seeing the Light: Visibility of the July '45 Trinity Atomic Bomb Test from the Inner Solar System

Details Seeing the Light: Visibility of the July '45 Trinity Atomic Bomb Test from the Inner Solar System Seeing the Light: Visibility of the July '45 Trinity Atomic Bomb Test from the Inner Solar System

Dec 2006

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2006phtea..44..604r&link_type=abstract

The Physics Teacher, Volume 44, Issue 9, pp. 604-606 (2006).

Physics

History Of Science, Nuclear Explosions, Observation And Data Reduction Techniques, Computer Modeling And Simulation

Scientific paper

In his The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Richard Rhodes remarks of the July 16, 1945, Trinity atomic bomb test in New Mexico that ``had astronomers been watching they could have seen it reflected from the moon, literal moonshine,'' an allusion to Ernest Rutherford's famous dismissal of the prospect of atomic energy.1 Investigating this impressive claim makes for a nice exercise in exploring astronomical magnitudes and leads to other intriguing questions: Just how bright would the explosion have appeared to an observer on the Moon, say, as compared to Venus? What about an observer on Mars or otherwise located in the solar system? What fraction of the bomb's yield was in the form of visible light?

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