Hi Jonathan,
> Speaking of Sydney, has anyone visited the Buran space shuttle on display
> in Sydney, Australia? I'd like to hear from anybody whoose seen it. It
> would cost me around 1500 US dollars to see it - and most of that is
> transportation costs. Is it worth that much money?
I wouldn't make a special trip to Sydney just to see Buran.
And even if I was going to Australia on vacation, I doubt
I'd spend valuable vacation time looking at it. Personally,
I'd rather spend it scuba diving! ;-) But to each his own.
> Also, I'm having some trouble visualizing deuterium ("heavy hydrogen").
> What is its atomic composition - how is it different than normal
> hydrogen. Everything I read about the subject doesn't make any
> sense to me.
Deuterium is one of hydrogen's three isotopes (the other
two are regular hydrogen, and tritium). The hydrogen
nucleus contains no neutrons; deuterium has one neutron,
tritium has two (and is radioactive). The number of
protons in an atom's nucleus determines its chemical
properties (since chemistry deals with an atom's
electrons, not its nucleus, and the number of electrons
matches the number of protons). So, chemically,
deuterium and tritium behave pretty much the same as
hydrogen. All can combine with oxygen to form water,
for instance. When the deuterium form of hydrogen is
combined with oxygen, you get "heavy water". Regular
water and heavy water have slightly different properties
due to the altered angle of the molecular bonds -- for
example, I think the melting and boiling points might
be very slightly different. --Rob
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