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I'm quite fascinated by astronomy - in fact I find it mind blowing.
A few things have happened recently that do not seemed to have been mentioned on here so I thought I would post a quick catch up for anyone who is interested.
First let me try and set the scene by stating a few basics for those who don't really know that much about the subject.
We, the earth and our fellow planets, Mars, Venus, Saturn, etc, are in the SOLAR SYSTEM - that is a group of planets revolving around a star (we call our star is the 'Sun')
Solar Systems clumped together in a neighbourhood make up GALAXY - we call our galaxy the Milky Way
Maybe it might help if you think of our Solar System as being Bolton, then our Galaxy (the Milky Way) is Greater Manchester (or say Lancashire if you prefer).
The next galaxy to us is a vast distance away - so vast in fact the distance is not measured in miles or kilometres but how long it would take if you could travel at the speed of light!
Now it starts to get mind blowing.
Our Galaxy is nowhere near been measured yet because it is thought to have many BILLION stars in it a guess is something like 300 Billion possibly many more - and its diameter across is thought to be something like 120,000 light years across maybe even more!
I don't know if any of you have been luckily enough to been on holiday somewhere where you could see the night sky free from all the light pollution that you get in towns and city's but if you had all the millions and millions of stars you could see (bar one) ALL are in our galaxy.
In fact we simply can not see with the naked eye any other star from another galaxy - the only think from outside we can see (and it is so far away it looks just like a speck of light) is our neighbouring galaxy known as The Andromeda Spiral - which by the way is on a collision course to crash into us but that is another story.
Why am I mentioning that we can see virtually nothing from outside our galaxy - it is to try and show you the scale we are working to because there is not just our two galaxy's (Milky Way and Andromeda) in the UNIVERSE (the universe is everything there is - if we have used Bolton, and Lancashire to use in place of Solar System and Galaxy, then think of the universe as being our world).
No, there are far more than two galaxys, the best guess for now is something like 100 BILLION galaxys each containing hundreds of billions of stars - and we haven't even started to count the planets they all have yet!
The universe is now calculated to be 13.7 billion years old - and 93 BILLION light years across is still EXPANDING at close on light speed!
Let me try and give you an understanding of this.
When some of the first stars where created and started to shine their light we, our galaxy, had not been born, by the time that light had been glowing and where TWO THIRDS of its way towards where we are today our solar system was just being born. As this light was almost upon us, the first complex life on earth was just evolving!
One speck of light had travelled 13 billion light years to us and we hadn't even got to our dinosaur stage yet!
And we are just ONE star out of HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS of stars in our galaxy and ONE galaxy out of Hundreds of BILLIONS of galaxy's in the universe.
Anyway what this recent news.
Well the big news was that something called gravitational waves (as predicted by Einstein 100 years ago) have just been discovered. Big deal I hear you thinking - well to find this wave two black holes had to collide into each other over a billion light years away and this distorted light that reached us by a fraction of an atoms width - and some clever bastards (Ian Dury reference) had to design and build something to find and capture that evidence.
Jaw droppingly clever really.
Also some astronomists now think their might indeed be a ninth planet in our solar system (we are down to eight since Pluto was relegated).
A Sky at Night iplayer programme on it for anybody who might be interested in it.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b07176xp/the-sky-at-night-planet-9-from-outer-space
A few things have happened recently that do not seemed to have been mentioned on here so I thought I would post a quick catch up for anyone who is interested.
First let me try and set the scene by stating a few basics for those who don't really know that much about the subject.
We, the earth and our fellow planets, Mars, Venus, Saturn, etc, are in the SOLAR SYSTEM - that is a group of planets revolving around a star (we call our star is the 'Sun')
Solar Systems clumped together in a neighbourhood make up GALAXY - we call our galaxy the Milky Way
Maybe it might help if you think of our Solar System as being Bolton, then our Galaxy (the Milky Way) is Greater Manchester (or say Lancashire if you prefer).
The next galaxy to us is a vast distance away - so vast in fact the distance is not measured in miles or kilometres but how long it would take if you could travel at the speed of light!
Now it starts to get mind blowing.
Our Galaxy is nowhere near been measured yet because it is thought to have many BILLION stars in it a guess is something like 300 Billion possibly many more - and its diameter across is thought to be something like 120,000 light years across maybe even more!
I don't know if any of you have been luckily enough to been on holiday somewhere where you could see the night sky free from all the light pollution that you get in towns and city's but if you had all the millions and millions of stars you could see (bar one) ALL are in our galaxy.
In fact we simply can not see with the naked eye any other star from another galaxy - the only think from outside we can see (and it is so far away it looks just like a speck of light) is our neighbouring galaxy known as The Andromeda Spiral - which by the way is on a collision course to crash into us but that is another story.
Why am I mentioning that we can see virtually nothing from outside our galaxy - it is to try and show you the scale we are working to because there is not just our two galaxy's (Milky Way and Andromeda) in the UNIVERSE (the universe is everything there is - if we have used Bolton, and Lancashire to use in place of Solar System and Galaxy, then think of the universe as being our world).
No, there are far more than two galaxys, the best guess for now is something like 100 BILLION galaxys each containing hundreds of billions of stars - and we haven't even started to count the planets they all have yet!
The universe is now calculated to be 13.7 billion years old - and 93 BILLION light years across is still EXPANDING at close on light speed!
Let me try and give you an understanding of this.
When some of the first stars where created and started to shine their light we, our galaxy, had not been born, by the time that light had been glowing and where TWO THIRDS of its way towards where we are today our solar system was just being born. As this light was almost upon us, the first complex life on earth was just evolving!
One speck of light had travelled 13 billion light years to us and we hadn't even got to our dinosaur stage yet!
And we are just ONE star out of HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS of stars in our galaxy and ONE galaxy out of Hundreds of BILLIONS of galaxy's in the universe.
Anyway what this recent news.
Well the big news was that something called gravitational waves (as predicted by Einstein 100 years ago) have just been discovered. Big deal I hear you thinking - well to find this wave two black holes had to collide into each other over a billion light years away and this distorted light that reached us by a fraction of an atoms width - and some clever bastards (Ian Dury reference) had to design and build something to find and capture that evidence.
Jaw droppingly clever really.
Also some astronomists now think their might indeed be a ninth planet in our solar system (we are down to eight since Pluto was relegated).
A Sky at Night iplayer programme on it for anybody who might be interested in it.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b07176xp/the-sky-at-night-planet-9-from-outer-space
