Tag Archives: astro201

Blog #B3 Emitting and Absorbing Light

I’m not going to lie, understanding how atoms absorb and emit light is one of the most confusing things to me.   There is just so much involved with the process that its easy for me to get confused on … Continue reading Continue reading

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Artificial Gravity

Given the importance of gravity to life here on Earth, it’s interesting to think about the lack of gravity used in space exploration. Of course there’s gravity in space, but not anywhere near the amount of gravitational force we feel on Earth. So why doesn’t NASA design its space shuttles and space stations to create artificial […] Continue reading

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Bullet Dropped vs. Bullet Fired

In this blog, I explore the phenomenon of gravity and how it is constant throughout our world. In my senior year of high school, I took a physics class that taught me a resounding lesson about gravity, and how anything thrown or fired at a constant level will take the same amount of time to […] Continue reading

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Gravitational Lensing

Isaac Newton may be well known for his Law of Universal Gravitation, but the law has a fundamental flaw—it states that only things with mass can be affected by gravity.  Photons, the quanta of light, have no mass, but we know that they are affected by gravity.  One of the ways we can see how […] Continue reading

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Historical Astronomers in Context

Johannes Kepler (December 27, 1571- November 15, 1630) Johannes Kepler was initially hired as Tycho Brahe’s apprenctice.  When Tycho died, Kepler was left to make sense of his observations; after years of analyzing them and trying to make sense of them in terms of circular orbits, he finally realized that planetary orbits are ellipses, not circles.  […] Continue reading

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Historical Astronomers in Context

Galileo Galilei Galileo Galilei is important to astronomy for several reasons.  Although he often receives credit for inventing the telescope, he did not actually do that.  He did, however, greatly improve upon them, to such an extent that they could be used to peer far into space.  His other great contributions were being the first […] Continue reading

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Historical Astronomers in Context – Johannes Kepler

Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) was a 17th century astronomer born in the city of Weil der Stadt in the Holy Roman Empire, in what is today Germany. He is best known for his discovery of the elliptical orbits of planets and his planetary laws of motion. These three laws explained that the planets orbited the sun […] Continue reading

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Nicholas Copernicus in Context

Historical Figures Copernicus: February 19, 1473 – May 24, 1543 Johannes Kepler: December 27, 1571 – November 15, 1630 Tycho Brahe: December 14, 1546 – October 24, 1601 Galileo Galilei: […] Continue reading

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Historical Astronomers in Context

Tycho Brahe: Tycho’s primary contribution to astronomy is his collection of stellar and planetary observations. Accurate to within one arcminute, Tycho’s naked eye observations were unprecedented in quality. Tycho proved that comets lay in the realm of the heavens and sought to improve upon the current model of the solar system. Although Tycho never lived […] Continue reading

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Tycho Brahe: Historical Astronomers in Context

sweet mustache! the 411 on Tycho Brahe: Brahe proposed a theory different than the one we support today (where the Moon orbits the Earth which orbits the Sun with the other planets) ; Brahe supported a geo-heliocentric solar system with the Moon and the Sun orbiting Earth and the remaining planets orbiting the Sun still. He … Continue reading » Continue reading

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