Astronomy

I've been a fan of astronomy for quite a long time, although there were some times where some aspects of it frightened me. So I thought this could be a thread for discussing various aspects of astronomy, like planets, stars and how the universe is put together. Or even astronomy-related stories of things people here have experienced.

By the way, the things that frightened me were first the "sun turning into a red giant" thing and the idea of an asteroid hitting the Earth. About the first thing, this was more when I was like 6 or 7 and I was reading an astronomy book with my dad. I misinterpreted where it said that the sun would engulf the inner planets in "5 billion years" as meaning "when the Sun is 5 billion years old" rather than "5 billion years from now." Given that the solar system is about 4.5 billion years old, reading things about that or about the history of the Earth scared me because it made me think that the sun was really close to turning into a red giant and that it would happen fairly soon. I found that I suddenly wasn't afraid of reading about star life cycles anymore when I was in 8th grade (age 13 for me) when I was reading about it in a textbook and now it's one of the most fascinating parts of astronomy for me.

The asteroid fear was more recent and started soon after the first fear ended, although it didn't turn me off from astronomy in general, just the parts about asteroids and comets. I'm not sure why that kind of thing doesn't scare me anymore like it used to, but maybe because it's not something that I can really change outside of promoting funding to people who watch out for Near-Earth asteroids so that more of them can be recognized and possibly stopped from hitting the Earth. I think learning more about how rare such things are (like the really big dangerous ones hitting the Earth) made it not so scary. I'm aware that it could happen, but I guess I realized that it doesn't really help anything to worry about it, like it's not worth putting one's life on hold for.

Half a billion years is in your frame of reference of soon??

To be fair, that is soon on a cosmic scale...

I'm pretty sure the OP is not a stellar entity though.

I dunno, they do have "Rainbow" for a screenname...

I was much younger at the time, I didn't have the same sense of cosmic time scales that I do now or an understanding of how long a billion years truly is. In fact, I've heard that it's more like we only have about a billion years before the sun's evolution makes it too hot on Earth for most life (in 2 billion years the Earth will be as hot as Venus is now!), and that doesn't really scare me because I understand now that the timescale for that is far in the future. I was speaking about things that I got scared of when I was much younger and didn't understand as much about astronomy and cosmic timescales. That fear kind of varied from a doomsday feeling of "that statement could be an estimate and it could come any day now" to a general feeling that "doomsday" sounded eerily close to the present. And some of it might have come from either thinking "4.5 is really close to 5" without thinking of the units being in billions of years and/or thinking that the date was "4.5 billion years and then the sun eats the inner planets" instead of 5 billion or that the Sun had been around for 5 billion years and thus the 5 billions were up already (that might have been from possibly reading an approximate number and not realizing it was an approximation).

It's less that I thought that I was a being on cosmic timescales and more that I didn't have a realistic sense of cosmic timescales at that time.

On a more lighthearted note, i usually pronounce the constellation Orion as "Oh ryan" and my joke is that it's "O'Ryan the Irishman" because that's what it sounds like to me (even though I know that's not what it's supposed to be). Or am I getting it wrong and is it really pronounced as "Or-ee-on"?

edited 6th Jun '11 10:30:52 AM by Rainbow

No, you have it correct, it's "oh-ryan". (Here's a pronunciation thingy: [1])

edited 6th Jun '11 10:31:29 AM by Jeysie

I first learned about astronomy at our local natural history museum, which had both a planetarium and an observatory. The stories behind the constellations were a source of fascination for me, and knowing stars' names was a comfort when camping out on dark nights. Later on, I used a map of the local stellar neighborhood that I pulled out of a national geographic as the basis of a Traveller RPG campaign. I serously considered majoring in Astronomy in college, but the math was overwhelming. Soon, I will start introducing my own kids to it, cant wait...

I think the fact that we're now finding extra-solar planets and also new dwarf planets in our own solar system is exciting. Even if it's not likely that humans could ever visit them, I still think it's possible that there are a few extra-solar planets that have some form of life, even if it's very simple like bacteria and other single-celled organisms. True, most of the planets that have been found are much bigger than Earth, but that's because those are easier to find first, like if aliens were studying our solar system they would probably notice the gas giants first. That doesn't mean there aren't stars that might have Earth-like planets orbiting them, or there even could be life forms that survive on different conditions than the ones we're used to on Earth (there are even some forms of bacteria that live on things like sulfur and die in oxygen so that's not too far-fetched).

Astronomy is one of those things where there always seems to be something new to discover about the universe.

I really like how, I'm not sure, raw astronomy is. Each celestial object is composed of so few things and despite their enormous size acts simply according to natural laws.

Apart from Dark Matter. That's just weird.

So yeah, I'm hoping to do a career in astronomy, if my feeble brainz can handle it. Astronomy is the future of humanity, really; we're going to have to get out of this place eventually, and we're going to need to know where to go!

Of course, space travel at the moment is very limited, but with the technological surge at hand, we're going to be developing plenty of new technologies at lightning speeds. It's going to be great! Maybe in about 100,000 years going to Mars will be as easy as going from your house to your workplace! Imagine that!

Maybe, if nature's laws allow them, spacial expansion into uninhabited planets will allow for a shift into a post-scarcity economy, although I'm not sure of how realistic that is - we'd have to solve a lot of space travel problems first in order to transport all those resources, not to mention getting to said planets in the first place!

But hey, for now, we gaze, right? Has anyone seen Cosmos?

I've seen some of it when I was younger. I mainly remember the one about star life cycles and noted that they used the same part of Rite of Spring for a supernova explosion that was played when the volcanoes were first erupting in the Fantasia version. Which then I just thought, both things are destructive and explosive in the short term but can help life spread and grow in the long term. At least I know that a lot of the elements that make up life on Earth are from supernovas and I've heard that volcanic eruptions help plants to grow in the long term (like that it enriches the soil in some cases), although I might be wrong about that. At least both things are explosive. I've also read the book, which I own.

Explosive, I guess they are...but otherwise, not really that similar.

I guess I was just trying to notice a pattern or link the two (although volcanic ash can be beneficial to soil, I just looked that up, so that would count). I guess another link could be that they're opposites in that the scene in Fantasia was showing the beginnings of the Earth and the supernova is the death of a star.

Pluto fourth moon found : http://tinyurl.com/3p5wf45

Huzzah! Long live Pluto!