Milky Way

Fixtures of the northern sky, the Big and Little Dippers, swing around the North Star, Polaris, once a day or once every 23 hours and 56 minutes. Polaris marks the north celestial pole around which all the stars of the northern sky appears to rotate. It also marks the end of the Little Dipper’s handle and the whole constellation (Ursa Minor) is circumpolar, which means it’s always above the horizon in northern latitudes to as far south as the tropic of Cancer (23.5 degrees north latitude). The…

eligible to become a stellar black hole, scientists can estimate that there are as many as ten million to one billion black holes in our galaxy alone. The stellar black holes are a lot more common because it is easier for them to form. One possible way for the creation of these massive black holes involves a series of chain collisions in a compact clusters of stars. This results in the buildup of extremely massive black holes, which then collapse to form medium sized black holes. These then…

The Life Cycle of Stars The life cycle of a star is an incredible, miraculous phenomenon that begins with just two elements: helium and hydrogen. The result is the all well known star that is seen twinkling in the night sky and also what lights up the day here on Earth. There are hundreds upon thousands of stars that take on many different sizes and colors. Depending on the size of the star from its birth, the star could take two paths at the end of its life: turn into a nebula leaving behind a…

The very idea of planets orbiting around stars would have shattered the views of many people throughout history. After the Copernican revolution taught us that the Earth is not at the center of the universe but rather planets orbits the Sun opened up the possibility that planets might also orbit other stars. About two decades ago, a new scientific revolution began with the first discoveries of planets orbiting around other stars, called exoplanets. An exoplanet, is any planet that orbits a star…

Space is extraordinary! It is full of planets, stars, and many other things. There are several different hypotheses that were proposed on how the solar system was created. One of these hypotheses is the Nebular that was formulated by Pierre-Simon de Laplace in 1796. Many years later, in the 1900s, the Protoplanet hypothesis was proposed by Carl von Weizsäcker and Gerard Kuiper. Forest Moulton and Thomas Chamberlin proposed the Planetesimal hypothesis in 1905. The Nebular hypothesis starts…

Cosmos episode 13, “Unafraid of the dark”, begins by talking about the vast amount of scrolls and information that was kept in the library of Alexandria. Many of the books and scrolls were lost when the mob attacked and destroyed the library. This is shocking because of all the history of Ancient times that he's been lost due to the destruction of these books. Although we lost many discoveries, we as humans continue to learn new information about the universe. This begins the discovery of…

The Messier catalog began when Messier was searching in 1757 for a comet, whose return was predicted by Edmond Halley (Redd). Due to a mistake in Halley calculations, Messier was searching in the wrong patch of sky. In 1758, he discovered a fuzzy patch in the constellation of Taurus. After his repeat observation of the patch, and noticing that it had not moved. The nebula became his first entry in his catalog which he names Messier 1 or Crab Nebula. The second object in his catalog was M2, this…

The most famous celestial bond, except for the rings of Saturn, is the Ring Nebula or also known as M57. The Ring Nebula is 2,000 light years away and as seen on Earth the nebula looks like a donut-like ring wrapped around the middle of a football shaped cloud of glowing gas. It’s about one light year across and the glowing light the Ring Nebula produces is not coming from the planets but rather from the hot central star ionizes atoms in the gas forming intense ultraviolent light. As seen…

In doing so many who have watched and heard the re-dubbing of the film, having never heard the original still feel as though it doesn’t quite fit what they are seeing on screen. This is a In the film Two Stars in a Milky Way, the audio or soundtrack had to be re-done due to the original being lost. In doing so many who have watched and heard the re-dubbing of the film, having never heard the original still feel as though it doesn’t quite fit what they are seeing on screen…

have chosen Gemini, because of its interesting shape and position in The Milky Way Galaxy. Gemini was one of the 48 constellations described by Ptolemy in the second century AD, amd it has been listed as one of the 88 modern constellations today. Gemini translates from Latin, literally meaning 'The Twins' because of its shape, which resembles two humans holding hands. The two brightest stars, representing the two 'heads' are named Castor and Pollux after the Greek mythological twins. The…