Popular Fun Activities

Astronomy is as large as the universe that it seeks to discover. Even a subset star astronomy is huge. There are ample phenomenon and objects in just our own solar system to keep someone bust for an entire life time. Some people, then, decide to become experts on the stars.

Star astronomy begins about 94 million miles from Earth, with our own sun. Its heat is staggering when the amount of heat the earth receives from it over that great distance is realized. The sun contains about 98% of the mass in our entire solar system. That includes all the other planets even with huge Jupiter and Saturn on our side. The sun could hold over 1.3 million Earths. The heat is generated from a nuclear reaction in the sun’s core where the pressure is 340 billion times the pressure on Earth and temperatures reach 27,000,000F. That would burn a pizza in a second.

Because it’s much closer to Earth than any other star, the sun is studied far more than all the other stars put together. It’s about 250,000 times closer to Earth than the next known star. Star astronomy gets interesting when you consider all of those stars out there. A human can see about 5000 stars, all in our own Milky Way galaxy, from Earth. More of the 1×10^22 stars in the universe can be seen through a telescope. By the way, that’s a 1 followed by 22 zeros. Hundreds of thousands of stars come into view even with an amateur telescope. That is amazing! Professionals using larger telescopes can see other galaxies that contain over 200 billion stars. It would take many lifetimes just to count that high.

Through star astronomy, scientists have now shown that many stars have plants. Planets cause stars to wobble, and that can be measured. In 2008, for the first time, astronomers took visible light photographs of planets orbiting distant suns. We are ever closer to finding intelligent life.

Is an intergalactic war in our near future? Probably not. But star astronomy and its study of our own Sun and all the stars in the universe will continue. Maybe it also continues somewhere on another planet!

Filed under: Hobbies on December 30th, 2008