Showing posts with label Astronomy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Astronomy. Show all posts

Saturday, March 26, 2016

SPACE, The Final Frontier

While it was just a TV show, that little speech at the beginning of the original Star Trek show really did do a good job of capturing our feelings about space.  It is those feelings that drive our love of astronomy and our desire to learn more and more about it.


A star forming region in the Large Magellanic Cloud, perhaps the 
closest Galaxy to Earth's Milky Way
PhotoSource: Wikipedia

The thing that is most exciting about studying the universe is also the most frustrating and that is that no matter how expert we get, we are always just getting started.  But if it’s any consolation, some of the most advanced minds in science and from history always felt that way about space.  Even the greats such as Copernicus and Einstein looked up into space and felt like they were just a spec in the presence of such infinity.

Of course space is not infinite.  It has to be finite which means somehow there must be an end to it.  But if there is, nobody on this tiny planet has figured out where it is.  The only thing that has brought us to “the end of the universe” is our limited ability to see any deeper into space.

But conquering the final frontier of space means more than just seeing more stars and planets and building the biggest telescope we can.  There are some mind blowing concepts about how space works that we have ahead of us to conquer.  The big bang and the expanding universe alone was enough to set your mind to spinning.  But then we have the coming of Einstein and the theory of relativity to set the entire idea on its ear.  All of a sudden space is not just three dimensions but the dimension of time becomes exportable and the twisting and maybe even travel through time seems almost possible.

The frontier of space is as much a journey of the mind as it is of distance.  When Steven Hawking showed us the mysteries of black holes, all of a sudden, time and space could collapse and be twisted and changed in those intergalactic pressure cookers.  If not for the wonders of radio astronomy, these ideas would remain just ideas but slowly science is catching up with theory.

But the brilliance of mathematicians and genius minds like Hawking and Einstein continue to stretch our concepts of space.  Now we have the string theory that could revolutionize everything we know about space, time and how the universe relates to itself.  We can’t just say, no, we have discovered enough.  It’s the final frontier.  The Starship Enterprise would not stop exploring so neither can we.  Because there is a hurdle still ahead that has a name but no real answer to it yet.  It’s called the Unified Field Theory and those that know tell us that when the Einsteins and Hawkings of our day crack that theory, every other theory will fall into place.

These exciting concepts seem some tools to put the enormity of space in context.  That may also be the value of science fiction.  Not only are science fiction writers often the visionaries of what comes to be in the future but they give us the idea that space is knowable, that despite how big it is and how small we are, we can conquer this frontier like we have conquered others before us.

For mankind, that is often enough.  If we can get the vision that we can conquer something, even if it is something so massive, so impossibly huge, it seems that we are capable of anything.  And the love of astronomy, maybe unlike any other force on earth, has brought together mankind toward that common goal of conquering the universe.  The quest to establish an international space station and to cooperate on spreading our reach off of this planet seems to find commonality between nations that otherwise cannot get along on the surface of the earth.



That alone may be a reason that we must continue to support astronomy locally and the space program nationally.  It is something that seems to bring peace rather than war and make us a better people.  But more than that it is as though this is what we were created to do.  To reach out to the stars may be our destiny.  If so then our love of astronomy is more than a hobby, it’s a calling.



Wednesday, March 2, 2016

The Night SKY

No matter how far along you are in your sophistication as an amateur astronomer, there is always one fundamental moment that we all go back to.  That is that very first moment that we went out where you could really see the cosmos well and you took in the night sky.  For city dwellers, this is a revelation as profound as if we discovered aliens living among us.  Most of us have no idea the vast panorama of lights that dot a clear night sky when there are no city lights to interfere with the view.

Milky Way
Milky Way (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Sure we all love the enhanced experience of studying the sky using binoculars and various sizes and powers of telescopes.  But I bet you can remember as a child that very first time you saw the fully displayed clear night sky with all the amazing constellations, meters and comets moving about and an exposure of dots of light far to numerous to ever count.

The best way to recapture the wonder of that moment is to go out in the country with a child of your own or one who has never had this experience and be there at that moment when they gaze up and say that very powerful word that is the only one that can summarize the feelings they are having viewing that magnificent sky.  That word is – “Wow”.

Probably the most phenomenal fact about what that child is looking at that is also the thing that is most difficult for them to grasp is the sheer enormity of what is above them and what it represents.  The very fact that almost certainly, virtually every dot up there in the sky is another star or celestial body that is vastly larger that Earth itself, not by twice or ten times but by factors of hundreds and thousands, can be a mind blowing idea to kids.  Children have enough trouble imagining the size of earth itself, much less something on such a grand scope as outer space.

But when it comes to astronomy, we do better when we fall into deeper and deeper levels of awe at what we see up there in the night sky.  Some amazing facts about what the children are looking at can add to the goose bumps they are already having as they gaze eyes skyward.  Facts like…

* Our sun is part of a huge galaxy called the Milky Way that consists of one hundred billion stars just like it or larger.  Show them that one hundred billion is 100,000,000,000 and you will se some jaws drop for sure.

* The milky was is just one of tens of billions of galaxies each of which has billions of stars in them as well.  In fact, the Milky Way is one of the small galaxies.

* If you wanted to drive across the Milky Way, it would take you 100,000 years.  But you can’t get there driving the speed limit.  You have to drive five trillion, eight hundred million miles per year to get all the way across that fast.

* Scientists calculate that the Milky Way is 14 billion years old.

These little fun facts should get a pretty spirited discussion going about the origins of the universe and about the possibility of space travel or if there are life on other planets.  You can challenge the kids to calculate that if every star in the Milky Way supported nine planets and if only one of them was habitable like earth is, what are the odds that life would exist on one of them?  I think you will see some genuine excitement when they try to run those numbers.



Such discussion can be fun, exciting, and full of questions.  Don’t be too hasty to shut down their imaginations as this is the birth of a lifelong love of astronomy that they are experiencing.  And if you were there that first moment when they saw that night sky, you will re-experience your own great moment when you was a child.  And it might set off a whole new excitement about astronomy in you all over again.