Category Archives: Class

The Imaginary Planet

While the five planets visible to the naked eye have been known for almost all of astronomy’s history, it was not until the discovery of Uranus in 1781 by Sir William Herschel that astronomers began searching for other planets in our Solar System. After Neptune was discovered in 1846, astronomers began turning their telescopes towards […] Continue reading

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“How Stars Shaped Our Bodies and Our Home Planet”

A portion of a nearby galaxy is illuminated in this Hubble Space Telescope image by the remnants of a once-explosive supernova. (Image credit: NASA/ESA/HEIC/Hubble Heritage Team) Nearly every component of our body and the planet we call home was created inside stars. Heavy atoms like carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen are produced from lighter elements like […] Continue reading

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Time Dilation and the Theory of Relativity

With our totally unrestricted guidelines on Blog 4, I would like to make a bit of a deviation from the content of our course and discuss time dilation and the theory of relativity! When I first learned about time dilation, which refers to the difference in elapsed time as measured by different clocks due to […] Continue reading

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Blog #4 – Evidence for the Existence of Dark Matter

Dark Matter is a fascinating topic, yet we know so little about it. Regardless, a good amount of evidence exists that indicates dark matter is real. One pertains to the flatness of rotation curves for spiral galaxies at extended distances. The graph does not drop off, but rather, continues in (essentially) a flat rotation curve, […] Continue reading

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The Other Side of a Black Hole

Based on Einstein’s theory of relativity, black holes have a theoretical opposite know as “white holes”. Rather than it being impossible for matter to exit (as is the case with black holes), it would be impossible for matter to enter a white hole. Physically, it would look very similar to a black hole: the only […] Continue reading

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Climate Change

CO2 Emissions in Different Continents Climate Change is one of the most important issues that has already affected our lives and one that threatens our future. To get an understanding we need to look back in history to when human’s began to cause a shift in the climate. In the 1800s, humans began the industrial […] Continue reading

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The Atmosphere as we know it

The atmosphere is split into four different layers: the troposphere, the stratosphere, the thermosphere, and the exosphere. The troposphere is the lowest layer and is where greenhouse gasses absorb the infrared light and where storms occur. The stratosphere absorbs solar ultraviolet light by ozone, Earth is the only planet to have this layer. The thermosphere […] Continue reading

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Blog Post 3: What will happen when our Sun dies???

Just as all things have a beginning, all things have an end. Unfortunately this applies to our Sun as well. As a kid, I used to think that the Sun was basically just like a lamp light in the sky. When a lamp runs out of batteries, all you have to do to make it […] Continue reading

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Trappist 1-E and the Possibility of Life

The Trappist 1 system is a collection of seven rocky worlds that orbit an ultra cool dwarf star which was named 2MASS J23062928-0502285 at the time of its discovery because of the telescope used. All of the worlds in Trappist 1 are Earth-like meaning it contains the same elements like iron, oxygen, magnesium, etc; however, […] Continue reading

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Black Holes info

There are places where amazing things happen. More specifically, there are points in space within which gravity pulls so tightly and on such a small area of surface that the space collapses in on itself, The space bends so much that even light, the fastest thing known to exist, can not escape its grasp. These […] Continue reading

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