My trip to the Valley of Fire in Nevada, Winter 2016
Hello friends (and Dr. G!), I am so happy to be here and have figured out the start of the mysteries of WordPress. I am a history student currently working on research with a Vanderbilt professor, and am thrilled to be diving deeper into history. I am even more thrilled to be able to dive into the history of the universe through astronomy. In my off time I am on the poetry staff of the Vanderbilt Review which is a literary journal on campus! I am looking forward to learning more through this semester and getting to know all of you.
This is me, simplified. While I did not need to simplify this image in order to better understand it, sometimes this must be done in the realm of science. The universe’s sheer vastness and complexity requires astronomers to make some simplifying assumptions in order to ever hope of attempting to create any working model of our universe. One of the most fundamental of these assumptions is called The Cosmological Principle. This principle assumes that the universe is both homogeneous (is uniform) and isotropic (looks the same in any direction) on large scales, and is central to the creation of cosmological models. Simplification is vital to our understanding of nature, hence the tagline of this blog: “Wildly Simplified Astronomy with Kevin C.” The content found herein is not simplified due to my lack of knowledge in astronomical topics, but rather because of the utter intricacy of the universe. Or maybe that’s just my excuse.
“Milk production at a dairy farm is low, so the farmer hires three consultants – a biologist, an engineer, and a physicist.
The biologist tells the farmer that he should feed the cows certain hormones to make them lactate more. The farmer asked how much this will cost and the biologist says many thousands of dollars.
The engineer proposes to make a better milking machine to get more milk per cow. The farmer asks how much it will cost and the engineer says many thousands of dollars.
The farmer then asks the physicist how much his idea will cost. The physicist responds,”It’ll cost nothing and can be implemented immediately!” The farmer was astonished and asks how this was possible. The physicist responds,”Now assume a spherical cow in a vacuum…” “
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This blog is for my astronomy class about our solar system. It will consist of a total of 8 posts about various topics in space, which may include the planets, constellations, asteroids, comets, Kuiper Belt objects, interstellar clouds, etc. I will be posting over the course of this semester, from January until April.
Hello everybody, I am Guangze Zheng, Vanderbilt class of 2017 and you are reading my first blog for ASTRO2110, the Solar System as well as my first ever blog on wordpress. This site is completely new to me, so please bear with me if I am ignorant of any features or utilities not specifically outlined in the rubric. Now onto the fun part.
I’ve been interested in space and astronomy for a very long time. When I first immigrated to the United States from China in 2002, I barely knew any English and it was hard to communicate in this new country. This all started to change when I was taken to the local public library and found some books with very interesting pictures on the cover which I would later learn consisted of various celestial bodies such as stars, planets, and galaxies. It piqued my interest enough to really start trying to learn the language so I could understand more than just the pictures, which eventually led into another one of my lifelong hobbies: reading. But that’s another topic.
One of my fondest memories as a child was receiving my first telescope as a birthday gift. It came with a stand and three different eyepieces and had a picture of the moon on the back, showing off its magnifying properties. I spent many nights with friends and family out in the backyard trying to see the moon, the planets, other stars, and possibly even some of the stranger phenomena I only ever read about in the books such as Quasars and Pulsars. I never saw anything other than the moon and a couple of the planets with it, and overall the telescope was never that great, but as a young wannabe astronomer, I had a blast.
My telescope (picture taken by me)
As I grew older, astronomy eventually took a back seat to more immediately pressing matters such as schoolwork, extracurricular activities, etc. I no longer spent hours reading books on the subject I could barely understand and most likely forgot most of the stuff I did read over the years, but I still did see movies such as Interstellar and The Martian along with paying attention to some of the more interesting headlines in the news every now and then for articles such as NASA Wants to Drop a Submarine in Titan’s Ocean to Find Life. Who knows, instead of looking out millions of light years away at distant stars and galaxies, life might exist in our own cosmic backyard. Fast forward to Vanderbilt, and I can nowtake a plethora of different courses on a plethora of different subjects. It’s high time I took some time to re explore one of my older passions and I look forward to learning about the Solar system with everyone in this class.
Thanks for reading, and have a great semester!
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Hello! My name is Saksham Malhotra and I am a Vanderbilt student majoring in Computer Science with a minor in Corporate Strategy. In this blog, I’ll be posting about interesting concepts, thoughts, and developments in astronomy that I learn about. One such thing that I have picked up from discussions in class so far is the possibility of a 9th planet and how it could explain much of the gravitational physics in our solar system.
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Hello everybody! My name is Brandon and I am a Physics/Math double major and a Philosophy minor here at Vanderbilt University. I will be using this blog to focus on various astronomy topics that I find interesting. If you are here, I hope that you find my discussions amusing. If not, here is a link to a website that you may find more entertaining.
