Have you ever looked up into the sky on a clear night and wondered how the stars and galaxies came to be? This paper will tell you about those small pinpricks of light in the sky. It will explain the great discoveries that astronomers like Galileo, Newton, and Hubble made. This paper will tell you everything about the stars and galaxies.
A galaxy is a system of millions or billions, maybe even trillions of stars that are composed with gas and dust, which is held together by gravitational attraction. Galaxies have been categorized throughout history according to their shape, size and brightness.
There are three kinds of galaxies, which include a spiral galaxy, elliptical galaxy, and an irregular galaxy. The only difference between the three is the shape and brightness of the galaxies. All galaxies are composed of the same components. Some components just differ from others. Edwin Hubble originally described a spiral galaxy in his 1936 work, The Realm of the Nebulae. But over the years been described differently but similar, but is changing because of all the technology improvements and vast pictures we’re able to take with satellites and telescopes.
A spiral galaxy has a distinct winding shape which is similar to a pinwheel. These waves cause new stars to form. The glow of the galaxy is composed of the stars shinning bright and size creating a bigger view. Famous spiral galaxies include the Triangulum Galaxy, Whirlpool Galaxy, Andromeda Galaxy, Sunflower Galaxy, Pinwheel Galaxy and many others that have yet been discovered.
Elliptical galaxies have less of a shine compared to spiral galaxies because it consist of old stars. The stars in an elliptical galaxy are often very close together making the center l...
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...ned out or even has collapsed, and is fading away. The white dwarf is what stars like the Sun become after they have exhausted their nuclear fuel. A typical white dwarf contains carbon and oxygen has a mass similar to the Sun, but is smaller.
Neutron stars are stars that are born from the explosive deaths of massive stars. The surface of a neutron star is made of iron. Despite their small in size has a 1.5 time mass of our sun, and are thus incredibly dense. Neutrons are very similar to a black hole but are really different. Neutron stars are just big equations in a scientist or astronomer eyes.
Main sequence stars are stars that are fusing hydrogen atoms to form helium atoms in their cores. Most of the stars in the universe are known to be a main sequence star, which is 90% of stars in the universe. The sun is a main sequence star, which not too many people know.
Clusters like NGC 6530 were formed from the same cloud, and as a result have roughly the same age. This makes them of particular interest to astronomers. Because clusters are all formed from the same material, have roughly the same age, and distance from earth, variations in their brightness is only due to their mass ("Open Star Clusters"). This makes them particularly useful for studying stellar evolution. This cluster was first observed by Hodierna in 1654, and later found independently by Flamsteed in 1680 when he discovered the cluster was located within the Lagoon Nebula. Like most open star clusters, NGC 6530 is relatively young; having been formed less than 6 million years ago ("Young Stars Paint Spectacular Stellar Landscape"). It is known to consist of more than a hundred known bright stars, the light of which show very little reddening as a result of interstellar matter from the nebula, this is likely because the cluster is located just in front of the
Two men named Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis has a debate in 1920 that is still important today for changing how we think about galaxies. They talked about five important things. The first thing they debated was how big our galaxy, the Milky Way, is. Shapley said that the Milky Way was much bigger than we first thought, 100,000 light-years across, and that, because it was that big, it had to be the only one. Curtis said the the Milky Way was smaller than that, and that other galaxies existed past ours. They were both right and both wrong. Shapley was right about the size of the Milky Way, and Curtis was right about there being many more galaxies in the universe.
Waller, William H. The Milky Way: An Insider's Guide. Princeton, N.J: Princeton UP, 2013. 42+. Print.
They’re carbon stars, a unique type of variable star, which accumulate soot in their upper atmosphere that scatters light near the blue end of the spectrum. What’s left for us to view is the red component of a star’s light. As the carbon particles build up, the star fades in brightness and gets even redder. Eventually, the carbon absorbs enough radiation to escape the star, and the cycle starts over again.
A Black hole is a theorized celestial body whose surface gravity is so strong that
Stars are born and reborn from an explosion of a previous star. The particles and helium are brought together the same way the last star was born. Throughout the life of a star, it manages to avoid collapsing. The gravitational pull from the core of the star has to equal the gravitational pull of the gasses, which form a type of orbit. When this equality is broken, the star can go into several different stages. Some stars that are at least thirty times larger than our sun can form black holes and other kinds of stars.
The extreme brightness of the O-type and B-type stars, coupled with the Earth’s atmosphere, has always made high-resolution imaging of the star-forming region difficult. But recent advances in adaptive optics and the repair of the Hubble Space Telescope have allowed for incredible detail into the center of the dust cloud. 3 The technological advances have also helped reveal several faint stars within the center of the nebula.
By 1936, astronomers had realized that the hazy balls they sometimes saw in their telescopes, which looked like stars obscured by gas, were actually galaxies (Hibbison).
Stars are born in the interstellar clouds of gas and dust called nebulae that are primarily found in the spiral arms of galaxies. These clouds are composed mainly of hydrogen gas but also contain carbon, oxygen and various other elements, but we will see that the carbon and oxygen play a crucial role in star formation so they get special mention. A nebula by itself is not enough to form a star however, and it requires the assistance of some outside force. A close passing star or a shock wave from a supernova or some other event can have just the needed effect. It is the same idea as having a number of marbles on a trampoline and then rolling a larger ball through the middle of them or around the edges. The marbles will conglomerate around the path of the ball, and as more marbles clump together, still more will be attracted. This is essentially what happens during the formation of a star (Stellar Birth, 2004).
The Big Bang, the alpha of existence for the building blocks of stars, happened approximately fourteen billion years ago. The elements produced by the big bang consisted of hydrogen and helium with trace amounts of lithium. Hydrogen and helium are the essential structure which build stars. Within these early stars, heavier elements were slowly formed through a process known as nucleosynthesis. Nucleosythesis is the process of creating new atomic nuclei from pre-existing nucleons. As the stars expel their contents, be it going supernova, solar winds, or solar explosions, these heavier elements along with other “star stuff” are ejected into the interstellar medium where they will later be recycled into another star. This physical process of galactic recycling is how or solar system's mass came to contain 2% of these heavier elements.
A star will blow up with the help of gravitational collapses. When a star explodes from nuclear fusion it is because so much mass has built up within its core and it cannot hold the weight. Neutrons are the only things in nature that can stop a core implosion. When a white dwarf suffers a supernova, the energy comes from the runaway fusion of carbon and oxygen in the core.
The Andromeda Galaxy being 220,000 light years across is the biggest of its local galaxy group which includes the Milky Way Galaxy, Triangulum Galaxy, and about 44 smaller galaxies. The Andromeda Galaxy contains about (1 trillion*10to the 12th power) stars, which is more then double the estimated 200- 400 billion stars located in our own Milky Way Galaxy. Along with this the Andromeda Galaxy has a brightness magnitude of 3.4 making it one of the brightest of all the Messier Object group.
A galaxy, also called a nebula, consists of billions of stars, interstellar gas, dust, and dark matter which are all bound to form a massive cloud in which we live in. Although it cannot be very well explained, dark matter makes up at least 90% of a galaxy’s mass. Galaxies also contain billions upon billions of stars and their diameter can range from 1,500 to 300,000 light years. That’s huge! The Milky Way, the galaxy in which we live in, is one of about 170 billion galaxies in the observable universe. Our Sun is one of the billions of stars in our galaxy, and our eight planets revolve around this star in only a tiny part of our galaxy. “The Earth’s solar system is believed to exist very close to the Galaxy’s galactic plane, due to the fact that the Milky Way essentially divides the night sky into two virtually equal hemispheres” ("All About the Milky"). It definitely makes people second guess the fact of there being life on other planets.
The Universe is a collection of millions of galaxies and extends beyond human imagination. After the big bang, the universe was found to be composed of radiation and subatomic particles. Information following big bang is arguable on how galaxies formed, that is whether small particles merged to form clusters and eventually galaxies or whether the universe systematized as immense clumps of matter that later fragmented into galaxies (Nasa World book, 2013). A galaxy is a massive area of empty space full of dust, gases (mainly 75% Hydrogen and 25%Helium), atoms, about 100-200 billion stars, interstellar clouds and planets, attracted to the center by gravitational force of attraction. Based on recent research, 170 billion galaxies have been estimated to exist, with only tens of thousands been discovered (Deutsch, 2011).
One thing us as humans have never been able to fully understand is astronomy. Always having an unexplained mystery, astronomy also has served as a way to keep time and predict the future. The word “astronomy” is defined as the study of heavenly bodies, meaning anything in the sky such as stars, galaxies, comets, planets, nebulae, and so on. Many people, if not everyone, is amazed by the night sky on a clear, moonless night.