Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Astronomy Science

Astronomy is the study of celestial objects--pretty much anything beyond Earth's atmosphere. Astronomy is concerned with evolution, physics, chemistry, meteorology, and motion of celestial objects as well as the evolution of the universe. Astronomy is one of the earliest sciences because humans have always been fascinated by the world beyond ours. Originally using only math and observations, information we have coming in from places beyond Earth is in the form of electromagnetic radiation, or light in the form of visible light, ultraviolet, x-ray, radio, infrared, and gamma rays. Astronomers must infer data such as size, temperature, luminosity, density, and other propeties just using that light that reaches our planet. The two types of astronomy are theoretical astrophysics and observational astronomy. Theoretical astrophysic has to do with theories of the laws of the universe and its history that cannot be developed merely by observation. A day on the planet Mercury is twice as long as its year. A dwarf star is so dense that it would take 8 men to lift a teaspoon full of its matter. Earth is the densest planet in our Solar system.Every second, the Sun pumps more than a million tons of material into the space through the solar wind Neutron stars are so dense that the individual neutrons are actually touching.The cosmos contains approximately 50,000,000,000 galaxies.

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