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Tag Archives: astro201
New Discoveries: The New Age of Astronomy
This picture compares the inner planets of our solar system to Kepler-62, a newly discovered planetary system NASA’s Kepler mission has recently discovered three super-Earth-size planets in the “habitable zone,” or the range of distances form a star where the surface temperature of an orbiting planet might sustain liquid water. It is planets like these […]
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Posted in Exoplanets
Tagged astro201, blog10, kepler mission, kepler-62, technology
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Impacts on Saturn and the Drake equation
NASA’s Cassini spacecraft recently observed meteors colliding with Saturn’s thin rings. This marked the first direct evidence of small meteoroids breaking into streams of rubble and crashing into Saturn’s rings, although astronomers already expected this to be occurring regularly. However, specific details of such impacts were merely speculation, much of which is cleared up via […]
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Posted in Observables, Small SS Objects, Stars
Tagged astro201, blog9, cassini, drake equation, saturn, technology
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Miller-Urey experiment
One of the most mysterious questions of human beings is that: how did life come to existence? Where did first trace of life come from? One hypothesis is that conditions and elements on early Earth gave rise to the first single-cell organism. To testify this hypothesis, chemists Stanley Miller and Harold Urey animated the conditions […]
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Posted in Class
Tagged astro201, astrobiology, blog10, Miller-UreyExperiment
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Astronomy201: Reflection and Take Away
The best part about this class has been the breadth of knowledge I have accumulated. We tend not to go too far into any one subject, but we cover enough […]
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Posted in Sun
Tagged astro201, blog10, solarflares, sunspots
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We are so unbelievably tiny!
above is a photo of what one artist pictures the Milky Way to look like. I googled “What the Earth looks like in the Milky Way” to see a range of ideas and predictions that currently exist. The Google Image results got me thinking. We are absurdly small. The Sun is massive compared to us, … Continue reading »
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The End of an Era
Or, more accurately, the end of a semester. I’ve had a lot of fun blogging for this class, and I’ve learned a lot about that vast expanse above our heads known as the cosmos. One of the most important things I’ve learned, I think, is the vastness of space. Even in our solar system, planets […]
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Posted in Class
Tagged astro201, blog10, drakeequation, endpost, Europa, interstellar extremophiles, universalscale
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Origins Of Life
Two scientists, Alexei Sharov and Richard Gordon, have plotted the genome size of different kinds of organisms against their presumed date of origin. They only had five data points, but […]
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11 of the Weirdest Solutions to the Fermi Paradox
The Fermi Paradox is the current contradiction between the estimates about the existence of extraterrestrial civilization and our current lack of proof and interaction with such a civilization. According to Wikipedia’s page on the Fermi Paradox, Fermi argues that The Sun is a young star and here are billions of stars in our galaxy that are more … Continue reading »
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A Grim Future, Brightened by the Stars
For my culminating post, I want to reflect on how my perspective on space and the future of astronomy has changed over the course of Astronomy 201. Firstly, everything I learned in this course, from gravity and planetary formation to stars and habitable zones, has given me a fundamental and scientifically realistic understanding of space […]
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Posted in Science, Space Travel
Tagged astro201, blog10, colonies, Malthus, Solar System, technology
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Guys, We are a Type 0 Civilization
The Kardashev Scale As we persevere in our search for other intelligent life out there in the far reaches of space, we should also remember that, if they exist, we have no idea what they would look like, or how powerful they might be in comparison to us, or how they would respond to us […]
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