Category Archives: Historical

historical astronomers in context

Posted on January 30, 2023 by Emma Williams

Johannes Kepler (born December 27, 1571– died November 15, 1630) contributed to the field of astronomy by the formulation of his 3 Laws of Planetary Motion, which were later derived and formalized by Isaac Newton. The laws are 1) that planets move in elliptical orbits around the sun at one focal point, 2) that a […] Continue reading →

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the cosmic calendar

Posted on January 19, 2023 by Emma Williams

The history of the universe is tough to wrap our heads around, much less to place in the context of our own lives! When studying astronomy, we are presented with so many large numbers — that the distance between earth and sun is 150,000,000 km, the universe is 14 billion years old, and the Milky […] Continue reading →

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Crop Circles, Extraterrestial Communication, and a Response to the Arecibo message

Posted on May 6, 2022 by jschorr21

In 2001, right near the world’s largest radio telescope in England, a strange phenomenon was observed. The crops near the telescope formed into an interesting formation: This formation from above convincingly resembled a face. Scientists were baffled, and what’s even more interesting is what came next. so in 1974, Carl Sagan sent out the Arecibo […] Continue reading →

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Blog Post 6: What Sokka and King Tut have in common.

Posted on April 18, 2022 by isaachuggins

Avatar the Last Airbender has received a surge of popularity in the past few years, as it is considered one of the most popular cartoon shows to ever air. One of the characters, Sokka, is a teenage boy from the Southern Water tribe and has multiple tools and skills, like his boomerang, to save the […] Continue reading →

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blog post 06

Posted on April 17, 2022 by graceward02

In 2019, researchers captured the first image of a black hole. They were able to do this by having all the major radio telescopes on Earth act together to simulate a radio telescope that was the size of Earth. Before this, we could only see indirect evidence of the existence of black holes. This particular […] Continue reading →

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blog post 05

Posted on April 17, 2022 by graceward02

In 2006, Pluto was taken off the list of planets, leaving our Solar System with just 8 planets. This demotion occurred 76 years after Pluto was initially added to the list of planets. This decision by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) defined what objects could be classified as a planet. An object needs to be […] Continue reading →

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Pluto: from planet to dwarf planet

Posted on April 11, 2022 by Lindsey

Pluto is one of the six dwarf planets that we have currently identified in our solar system, and it was the first object discovered in the Kuiper belt. It was discovered in 1930 and was initially declared to be the ninth planet. However, when other objects were discovered in the Kuiper belt (like the dwarf […] Continue reading →

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Blog 6: Asteroids

Posted on April 7, 2022 by camsto42

On this Tuesday, April 5th, an asteroid the size of a house flew by the Earth. This asteroid flew by 79,000 miles away from us, which is actually pretty close. That distance is around 1/3 the distance between us and the Moon. Although there is always some panic that an asteroid could hit Earth, this […] Continue reading →

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Where does the speed of light come from?

Posted on March 22, 2022 by jschorr21

It might seem that the definition of the speed of light is simple–light can only physically go as fast as 300,000 km/s. This is true, but there is a lot more that goes into that number, and it doesn’t really have much to do with light. There is a lot more that goes into that […] Continue reading →

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Kepler Supernova

Posted on March 22, 2022 by Kaitlyn Lane

The image above is of Kepler’s Supernova, which Johannes Kepler is credited with discovering with his description of the stellar object in his De Stella Nova. As stars progress through their main sequence lifetime and beyond and use up more of their hydrogen in nuclear fusion, they can fuse heavier and heavier elements. More massive […] Continue reading →

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