Astronomy

Astronomy

1. Big Bang Theory

   • Big bang is the origin of space and time itself
   • The first real evidence of the big bang is the milky way
   • You can look back in time and see that the universe was created 13.7 billion years ago
   • Everything was compressed into a hot energy that created the universe
   • There has to be the right amount of gravity, too little will break everything, too much will create black holes
   • E=MC2 is believed to have helped in the finding of the universe

2. Stars and Spectrums

   • Stars are many different colours
   • Some stars are big, others small
   • Some stars are bright
   • Stars are very close together
   • We can tell the elemental composition of a star by looking at it’s light patten.
     • Continuous spectrum
       • V I B G Y O R
     • Emission lines
       • B G R
     • We can infer the stars age from it’s light pattern
     • We can infer the stars mass from the light pattern

3. How the universe works

   • All stars start out as clouds of dust and gas
   • 3 ingredients to make a star
     • Hydrogen Gravity Time
   • Albert Einstein discovered how stars work
   • When fusion slows down, our sun will swell from 1 million miles across to 100 million miles across and become what is known as a red giant.
   • When hydrogen runs out, stars will fuse helium into carbon and blasting out immense amounts of energy.
   • After all the helium is converted, our sun as a red giant will turn into a white dwarf
   • A sugar sized cube of white dwarf matter would be so dense it would fall through the ground

4. Dwarf planet

   • Must be in orbit around a star
   • Has enough mass to be pulled into a stable sphere shape by gravity
   • Dominate its orbit (i.e., its mass must be greater than anything else that crosses its orbit)

5. Comet

   • Large chunks of ice, dust and rocks
   • Some comets take a few years to orbit the sun whereas others take hundreds of thousands of years
   • Comets are either classified as short or long period of time

6. Meteoroids

   • Most are the size of dust particles but, some can be the size of a car
   • They can be pulled by earth's gravity into the atmosphere and as they get pulled in, they burn up and create a streak in the sky
   • Meteors enter earth's atmosphere at a speed of 1.5x10᩹km/h

7. Asteroids

   • Too small to be considered a planet
   • Asteroid belt is between Mars and Jupiter
   • Asteroids vary in size and can have a diameter of up to 950 KM

8. Galaxy

   • This structure is roughly 100,000 light years across it has a central bulge with swirling arms. Is is thought in the centre there is a supermassive black hole, but light from closeby star clusters hide it. The arms themselves comprised of star clusters.

9. Universe

   • The largest known structure to human kind. This structure is thought to be web-like in nature. Superclusters of galaxies exist within. It is thought to be roughly 14 billion years old.

10. Solar system

    • This structure has various planets that orbit a central star. Some planets and objects are relatively small and some are quite large. Comets, asteroids, meteorites and also reside with these structures.