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Looking to the Future

Posted on by conorastr201

Perhaps my biggest takeaway from this course has been an excitement for the future of space exploration and discovery. I was pretty interested in astronomical subjects coming in (obviously, or I wouldn’t have taken the course), but Dr. G’s passion for discovery and stars and planets is infectious. While I probably won’t remember the characteristics and chemical makeups of all of the Jovian planets, I will always remember that at any moment a rogue black hole could tear through our solar system, killing us all, and that there is absolutely nothing we can do about that. I look forward to watching the our flyby of Pluto and Charon, of find more extra-solar planets, of finding a way to achieve warp speed, and of discovering life outside of Earth.

The New Andromeda Photo

Posted on by conorastr201

Earlier this month, scientists from NASA and the ESA took a massive photograph of the Andromeda galaxy. The picture contains over a billion pixels and takes up over 40GB of hard drive space. Watching the video provided in the source is absolutely mind boggling; it gets very up close and personal, yet each pixel of the image contains, on average, 667 stars. And we have to remember, the Andromeda galaxy is but one of many. There are billions of galaxies in our universe, each with a trillion stars. The vastness of space is truly mind-boggling.

It seems inevitable that we will some day explore this vastness, but what will we find out there? New elements? Systems and objects that break our current understanding of physics? Life? The possibilities are endless, and they are all out there waiting for us.

Source: http://www.iflscience.com/space/take-time-appreciate-size-universe

The Search for Habitable Exoplanets

Posted on by conorastr201

Earlier this month, the Kepler space telescope spotted three planets of Earth-like size orbiting in a nearby star’s “habitable zone,” or the area around the star in which water could exist in liquid form on a planet’s surface. However, the planets they found, along with the other 26 Earth-like exoplanets found thus far, do not perfectly mimic our own planet and have been deemed uninviting to life as we know it.

After searching thousands of systems and discovering close to 2,000 planets outside our solar system, none look promising of supporting human life should we ever need to find a new home, which begs the question: is our system unique? Given the infiniteness of space it seems unlikely, but we have yet to prove that true. Perhaps the conditions that brought about our home, with days just long enough to warm our surface, but not so long that our ground is cooked, and a million other chance occurrences, really do make us one of a kind.

Source: http://www.iflscience.com/nearby-star-has-three-planets-slightly-larger-earth-one-habitable-zone