Monthly Archives: January 2016

The Cosmic Calendar

Posted on January 25, 2016 by Sofia

We, as humans, can have difficulty understanding amounts that exceed our narrow perspective. To aid us in understanding the 14 billion years that the universe has existed and the minuscule amount of time humans have inhabited it, scientists have put it in our terms of one year. Each month of the “cosmic calendar” represents roughly 1 … Continue reading “The Cosmic Calendar” Continue reading →

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Blog #2 – Midnight Sun

Posted on January 25, 2016 by martisnv

Every morning the sun rises on the Eastern horizon, and every evening the sun sets in the West. I have seen approximately 7800 of these sunrises and sunsets over the course of my life. Every night I go to bed in the dark, … Continue reading → Continue reading →

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Blog #2 – Midnight Sun

Posted on January 25, 2016 by martisnv

Every morning the sun rises on the Eastern horizon, and every evening the sun sets in the West. I have seen approximately 7800 of these sunrises and sunsets over the course of my life. Every night I go to bed in the dark, … Continue reading → Continue reading →

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The size of the universe and what that means for space travel

Posted on January 25, 2016 by sarabkeller

If there is one thing that I have learned so far in the Solar System, it’s that the universe is really big. Just for light to travel from one end of the Milky Way galaxy to the other takes 100,000 light years, and this distance is short compared to the universe itself! Additionally, since light […] Continue reading →

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The Great Shift

Posted on January 25, 2016 by alecsolarsystem

The Earth is like the top from Inception. As it spins around at very high speeds it wobbles or “precesses” back and forth as the force of gravity from the Moon and Sun tug it from different directions, but it will never fall over. This movement, although much slower and less noticeable than the Earth’s […] Continue reading →

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Consequences of breaking the speed limit

Posted on January 25, 2016 by OscarBen

The effects of aberration and the Doppler Effect. Source: Comic Vine During one of the first class sessions, we were given a minute or so to write down what would happen if the speed of light was only 100 mph. I’d never really thought about this before, so I struggled to get anything more than “The… More Consequences of breaking the speed limit Continue reading →

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Ahead Warp Factor One

Posted on January 25, 2016 by impossibleensign

People love to speculate about faster than light travel, but how did we come to know the speed of light? Continue reading →

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Blog #1 |Discovering Scale of the Universe

Posted on January 25, 2016 by briannagalgano

It is hard to imagine the actual scale of the universe from a human perspective. Humans have personally witnessed the vastness of space only as far as the Moon and Earth orbit (International Space Station, as one vehicle). Instead, computer stimulations can help us get an idea of exactly how far the universe, as we […] Continue reading →

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Cosmic Calendar: The Month of January

Posted on January 24, 2016 by andyastronomer

After studying the Cosmic Calendar, very little appears to have happened in “the first month of the universe.” Aside from the Big Bang in January and the formation of the Milky Way in March, most of the action begins in September, reaching a climax in December. Of course, the notion that little happened in the […] Continue reading →

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Name That Constellation

Posted on January 24, 2016 by Chloe

The Night Sky, showing the Milky Way, at La Silla Observatory in Chile. Source: Wikimedia Commons.   The constellations visible from the Western Hemisphere differ from those visible from the Southern Hemisphere. In English, we typically use names derived from Greek and Roman mythology for the constellations, referring to constellations such as Orion and Pleiades […] Continue reading →

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