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---------------------- 2730 - ASTRONOMY - has some amazing stories?
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Astronomy has some amazing stories to tell. The Universe has so much magic on display. It is too bad so many people live their lives never realizing it. At the same time it is magical it is the natural order that we all live under and are still learning about.
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- These are nature’s laws that we are trying to understand. What we learn is that the true universe is far stranger and more incredible than we can even imagine.
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- The average human is made with 7x10^27 atoms. That is 7 followed by 27 zeros. And these are the same atoms that are in the stars and nebulae we see throughout outer space. What we see is the same stuff we are made of. We both make up at least 60 natural elements.
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- Our bodies are made of mostly oxygen measured by mass. Carbon is second , then hydrogen, then nitrogen. The other trace elements include calcium, phosphorous, potassium, sulfur, sodium, chlorine, magnesium.
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- There are 118 chemical elements in total. 94 occur naturally and 24 are inside nuclear reactors to be collected and studied by scientists.
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- Copper was discovered by Stone Age humans in 9,000 BC. By 6,000 BC humans were using lead and gold. Iron in 5,000 BC. The Bronze Age started in 3,500 BC.
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- The element hydrogen was discovered by Henry Cavendish in 1766. Oxygen, chlorine, manganese and tungsten were also discovered in the 1770’s.
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- The very first elements originated in the Big Bang some 13.8 billion years ago. It started with hydrogen, a single proton and a single electron. Deuterium, helium, and lithium were also created in this first “nucleosynthesis“.
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- The rest of the elements were not created until the stars exploded as supernovae. The stars are nuclear fusion reactors. Just liken our Sun. The fusion is what creates all these heavier elements. And, the supernovae is what spreads all these elements into space to be reassembled into another star by the force of gravity.
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- You are here reading this because your atoms were created in the Big Bang and in the centers of stars. It took a few billion years before your parents could bring you into this world.
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- To understand how this happened we have to learn more about the birth , life and death of stars. Stars are born in a great cloud of gas called a “nebulae“. The clouds are mostly gas, hydrogen and helium. The gas is ionized meaning the nucleus carries a positive charge because they are usually missing their electrons in their shells.
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- This ionization is caused by energized hot star‘s radiation, either inside or near them. This radiation causes the gas to glow thus creating the nebulae that astronomers can see. These clouds of gas and dust were created by previous supernova explosions.
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- Everything in the Universe is expanding as space is expanding. Everything is moving away from each other. The only exceptions are those masses that are close enough together for gravitational forces to overcome the expansion energy. We call this expansion energy, “Dark Energy”. And, we can not yet explain what causes it?
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- Stars and galaxies close to each other can merge with the force of gravity. This same gravity can pull gasses together to form new stars. The attraction must collect enough mass in a concentrated core for nuclear fusion to start. Once this fusion reaction starts a new star is born.
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- The nebulae that astronomers can see most all belong to the Milky Way Galaxy. Our own Sun formed in this way some 4.6 billion years ago. Our Earth came along orbiting the Sun some 4.3 billion years go.
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- The nebulae that we can see are stellar nurseries. It is those that are energized and glowing of their own accord. There are gas nebulae that not as energized and only glow with reflected light.
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- Astronomers learn more about these nebulae by studying their “spectra“. Fortunately chemistry is uniform throughout the Universe. Chemistry is the only thing we experience every day in our lives, except our thinking. And, our thoughts themselves are the result of chemical reactions within the brain.
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- We assume that chemistry and physics are consistent throughout the Universe. We have a lot to observe in our own Milky Way Galaxy. Our galaxy contains over 400 billion stars spread across a flattened disk that is 100,000 lightyears across. Our Sun is just one of these stars that orbits out about 24,000 lightyears from the center.
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- The center of our galaxy is a blackholes about 4,500,000 more massive than our Sun.
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- We knew about our 8 planets in our own Solar System. But, it was not until 1992 that astronomers discovered the first planet orbiting another star. Today, in 2020, we know of 4,100 planets orbiting other stars. These are all in our own galaxy.
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- The Kepler Space Telescope discovered 2,600 of these “exoplanets” from 2009 through 2018. TESS is a new space telescope that is beginning a new search for exoplanets, and even exterritorial life itself.
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- Astronomy is only in the pioneering days of planet searches. The search is driven by the question , “ Are we alone?” This search is in our galaxy. But, there are over 100 billion other galaxies in the Universe. And, that is just the visible Universe. There is more universe beyond the distance that light as traveled so far.
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- With all this real estate how can we possible be all alone? We know that chemistry is uniform throughout the universe. Complex organics exist in many places out in space.
We were born of the cosmos. We are still the children that have a lot more to learn.
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- May 4, 2020 2730
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--------------------- Monday, May 4, 2020 -------------------------
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