Tag Archives: astro201

Hubble Images: Not as Easy as Just Taking Pictures

Posted on February 20, 2013 by zvgio

Most people have heard of the Hubble Space Telescope, a visible light telescope that has been orbiting Earth since 1990, and if they haven’t, they’ve probably at least seen some of it’s images of distant galaxies and majestic nebulae. These pictures are vibrantly colorful and awe-inspiring, but they don’t start off that way. All of […] Continue reading →

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White Holes?

Posted on February 20, 2013 by charlesbcochran

The idea of a black hole has been along for a long time, as a region in space having a gravitational field so intense that no matter can escape from it. These regions have not been directly discovered so to … Continue reading → Continue reading →

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Conservation of Angular Momentum and Kepler’s Second Law

Posted on February 19, 2013 by YanruChen

Conservation laws are very important laws for celestial objects in the universe. Without conservation laws, all these celestial objects will not obey predictable motions as they do in this universe. I am going to talk about conservation of angular momentum in this post. Any objects orbiting or rotating have angular momentum. To change angular momentum […] Continue reading →

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Dark Matter and the Missing Mass Problem

Posted on February 19, 2013 by rtjobe

We have a huge problem. Like a we-seem-to-be-missing-95%-of-the-universe kind of problem.  If you look at the way that galaxies are constructed you will notice that they are very bright in the center and tend to get dimmer as you travel outward, indicating there must be more mass in the center than the outside.  This would […] Continue reading →

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Using Paintballs to Deflect Asteroids

Posted on February 19, 2013 by AlanL

As you probably know on Friday February 15th there were two meteors heading Earth’s way. One of which crashed in Russia injuring over 1,000 people and the other missed Earth by 17,000 miles. The one that hit Russia was only 1.5 the size of a school bus while the other was 3 times that. Obviously […] Continue reading →

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Neutrino Detectors

Posted on February 19, 2013 by Will K

Over the past several decades telescope technology has improved dramatically. Not only are we able to view the galaxy from massive observatories on Earth, but we can capture light through telescopes orbiting in space. Although these advances have allowed us to detect light from many different ranges across the electromagnetic spectrum, telescopes cannot detect all […] Continue reading →

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Archeoastronomy and Stonehenge

Posted on February 19, 2013 by rtjobe

Archeoastronomy is not as the name at first implies a study of ancient astronomy, but rather the study of how astronomy affected early civilizations. In a sense, it is a combination of astronomy, anthropology, and history with respect to ancient cultures. Archeoastronomers look at a variety of types of evidence in their efforts to determine […] Continue reading →

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Physics of Gravity

Posted on February 19, 2013 by YanruChen

What is physics? I have been studying physics since elementary school, but I was never really taught about the definition of physics. My personal understanding of physics is that it is a study of the law of the nature. The nature of physics is truly mysterious. Why do things obey the same law? Why can […] Continue reading →

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Archeoastronomy

Posted on February 19, 2013 by AlanL

Over the summer I was in Mexico and visited some Mayan ruins in Tulum and Chichen Itza. It was incredible to hear all about how the cities were built with regard to the sun’s movement in the sky. In Chichen Itza, there is an observatory where they had 20 sight lines each marking a different […] Continue reading →

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Dark Matter vs Dark Energy

Posted on February 19, 2013 by fathomingthestars

In my previous post, I wrote about dark matter and how we can infer its existence through gravitational lensing.  Here, I will more fully explore what dark matter is and what dark energy is. Dark matter, as the name implies, is matter that is dark and cannot be seen.  “Seen” here does not mean visible […] Continue reading →

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