Galaxy

William Huggins was an amazing contribution to the rise of astronomy. When Huggins was born in Cornhill, England on February 7, 1824. A bit later in life, Huggins married Margaret Lindsey who also had an affinity for astronomy. She persuaded her husband to continue his work and together they became a dynamic duo of astronomers. Somewhere towards the middle of his life, William Huggins built an observatory on top of the roof of his own house. At this time, he lived in Tulse Hill, England. The…

Universe 1. Galaxies can be as large as a few thousand to several hundreds of thousands of light years across. 2. Astronomers, at the time this was released, believe that there are over a hundred billion galaxies in the universe. 3. It is estimated that a light year is 5.88 trillion miles. 4. Galaxies come in three different main type shapes. There are spiral, elliptical, and irregular. 5. Spiral galaxies usually have a large flat disk… 6. Lenticular are similar to spiral galaxies except…

Long have we have looked to the stars, be it for navigation, spiritual guidance or shear awe. But, believe it or not, the wonders we see in the night sky with our naked eyes are only a glint of the universe’s enormity, and, as said by Julianne Dalcanton in her 2009 article 18 Years of Science with the Hubble Space Telescope, our hazy atmosphere even limits our ground-based instruments as well. (Dalcanton) Both the incapability of our eyes and our local telescopes hindered astronomy for…

Science 07 March 2017 The Milky Way The galaxy is made of many diverse stars. From Protostars to Supergiant stars, it is also very unique. It consists of the only known planet that can sustain life (Earth ). As we know, the galaxy is full of stars. But did you know it is almost as old as the universe, or it was made of several galaxies that collided to create our galaxy? Here are some basic facts to improve your foundation of your understanding of our galaxy, the Milky Way. ( Below here is an…

help of interstellar travel, humans would have the means to continue expansion to a endless extent. Mankind could grow, colonize, and continue to live without ever having to worry about overpopulation. Mankind as a species could spread throughout the galaxy and live in comfort, using resources and materials from various planets to continue to expand until the end of time. Christopher Columbus would never have discovered America if not for colonization, and we will never discover new lands…

I found four Perytons when I searched for non-repetitive, dispersed radio bursts in the archival Parkes Multibeam Pulsar Survey. The motivation was to understand this population better, including “Rotating Radio Transients” (RRATs), “Fast Radio Bursts” (FRBs) and “Perytons”. RRATs are radio pulsars which can be detected in single-pulse searches more easily than periodicity searches. It is now believed that these are extreme examples of the radio pulsar population, and their pulsed emissions are…

figure out what it is, but no one truly knows what composes dark matter. Physicists are so interested in understanding dark matter because it accounts for the formation of the Universe, as observable through studying the distribution of gravity within galaxies (Carnegie). Original attempts at studying dark matter referred to dark matter as baryonic, which is a word used to describe baryons, or quark based particles. Quarks make up “normal” subatomic particles, and so when referring to dark…

NGC 584 is an elliptical galaxy in the constellation Cetus. The galaxy was discovered on 10 September 1785 by the German-British astronomer William Herschel. Number 20 in the Herschel 400 list is NGC 584. NGC 584 is a moderately large and bright elliptical galaxy in Cetus. In an 18 inch telescope it appears as an elongated patch of light with a bright center. The two bright galaxies either side of NGC 584 are the 13.2 magnitude NGC 582; (left) and the 15.2 magnitude PGC 1028168. (Right). While…

A Stars lifecycle can span from millions to trillions of years depending on the size of the star. Starting from a cloud of gas and dust then transforming into something that we on earth see every day as our own Sun then finally collapsing upon itself and eventually dying. Stars have been a major part of the development of life on Earth and will continue to dictate how we live our lives. Without these enormous balls of gas and energy life as we know it would cease to exist. This is regrettably…

Stars are complex and giant balls of matter that have many things to understand about. Stars are born of gas and dust and have a life cycle based on their original mass. All stars start out in their main sequence, but the first difference between the mass of stars is when they stop producing energy. The low-mass stars become giant, and the high-mass stars become super giant. For low-mass, the star then becomes a planetary nebula, then finally a white dwarf. High-mass stars become a supernova, a…