Astronomy

As you look up on the night sky and spot out the celestial bodies and think of the never ending new findings, you may wonder on the ever going universe that exists and speculate on what exactly it consists of, not just what the textbooks say it does but what your eyes see. You may think upon the thought on how close our generation is to reach this never before thinkable heights that one day we may be taking possibly regular trips from space to earth. What Im basically trying to say is that the universe we live in is always changing and were likely to finding more and more about this never before reachable world. This tickled my curiosity for the reason that I have an urge to want to become an astronaut and explore beyond the walls of the atmosphere. Therefore my topic is on astronomy which means the study of celestial bodies. Im researching the topic of astronomy to have more than the general information on the subject and to be able to understand something that I have an urge to learn. Stars are one of the most amazing bodies in space starting from birth to the great fireworks at the end, but before I can explain the beginning of stars I have to explain a stars mother a nebula. A nebula is diffuse interstellar dust, gas or even both. Those are the basic ingredients to make a star. Then, after the nebula cloud gets hot and dense enough fusion begins to take place the combination of hydrogen atoms into helium atoms. Now depending on the amount of gas or dust will be the outcome on whether you have a single star a binary star or a whole cluster of stars. Lets just say that the star we are focusing on is the sun. The sun is an average size star and is about 6,000 right now and it is recently in its main sequence stage, but the sun would have already gone and have to go to go through these nine stages. The first stage is a process Ive already explained that stars are born from nebulae. The second stage is the Protostar that are made after a region of condensing matter begins to heat up and a glow begins to show. If the protostar contains enough matter it can even reach 15 million degrees Celsius. Then the third stage comes in where fusion begins to occur between hydrogen, because of the

temperature increase. After the third stage the star begins to release energy, they begin contracting less causing the star to shine more making it a main sequence star: the longest part of the life of a star. The fifth stage starts after about 10 billion years that the star has been in main sequence, what happens is that all the hydrogen has fused to form helium. The sixth and seventh stage involve the core, stage six: helium core is beginning to contract causing reactions to begin in the shell around the helium core. The eighth stage is called a planetary nebula, the helium core has just run out and the layers that drifted away from the core come out as a gaseous shell, this is what is called a planetary nebula. The ninth and final stage is very interesting. Now the remaining core, which was 80% of the original star, is about to begin its final steps to become what will be its last morph age. This is the process in which the star becomes a white dwarf and when the star cools and dims it becomes a black dwarf. The final stage of a small star would be different from a massive star. A massive star would have been creating a nuclear reaction taking place in itself, slowly forming different elements in the shell around the iron core. The core then collapses faster than the blink of an eye at that moment shinning brighter than the galaxy itself. The Chinese witnessed the first ever recorded, not existing but recorded, supernova in 185 AD. They said it changed the climate of their environment and left the sky shining bright for quite a long time. The Crab Nebula was produced by a super nova explosion that happened at around 1054 AD. Astronomers noted that it left the sky shinning bright for months. Furthermore, if the surviving core from the explosion is 1.5 - 3 solar masses the star becomes a neutron star if its any bigger than that the star would dreadfully become a black hole. A black hole is a space in which it wraps the two greatest natural powers; time and space. Black hole is one of the obscurities of space that astronomers do not fully understand. A size of a black hole is when no particles can be escaped from it not even particles of light. The force of the counter-clock wise rotation is so immense that it even causes light to bend: this is called the event horizon. If our sun were

to turn into a black hole it would have an event horizon of about 3km long. That would be a long way from now so there is no real need to worry of the sun turning if anything into a black hole. In our solar system there was supposed to be a binary star that would be the sun and what we know as Jupiter. Jupiter is what astronomers call a failed star. Along the process of becoming a star it never reached equilibrium which caused it to fail. This explains why Jupiter is the only planet to give of its own energy and why its so big that earth can fit in it about 1320 times. Its a good thing it failed for on the contrary, we wouldve seized to exist. There are 8 planets if you still consider Pluto a planet. Though, scientists consider it a dwarf planet. Pluto sometimes does not meet the criteria for a planet like its size the way it rotates in an oval not a circle like the other planets do. Earth is 70 % water on its surface and only 1% of that water is drinkable. This is the water that is stuck in the glaciers rivers or coming from the mountains. Earth is also the only planet with life even though Saturn's moon, Titan, has the building blocks for it and there was water in mars. Venus can be considered Earths evil twin, there about the same size and about the same mass but other than that Venus is a hellish place to be. If u ever landed on Venus you would be crushed by the atmospheric pressure, its like swimming a kilometer under the ocean. If that isn't enough you could easily suffocate with the deadly poison carbon dioxide in the air. Rain has a whole different feel over there too, it rains sulfuric acid coming down from the clouds of sulfur dioxide. Compared to other planets Venus is weird to it takes 243 days to make a rotation not 24 hours like earth. Also if we were looking down at the solar system all planets are spinning in counter clock ways except for Venus it goes in a clockwise turn. Mars is another interesting planet it is known as the red planet because it is made up of rust. Scientist recently discovered enough water under the surface of this red planet to fill Michigan Lake twice. Another interesting subject in the universe is gravity. Gravity is a complex very had to understand law it is a theory proven by Newton and retouched by the great Albert Einstein. Newtons

Law basically states what goes up must come down and if something is covering about the same surface area as something else they will fall at the same time. Einstein really proved what gravity was. Gravity has something to do with dark matter. Dark matter is matter we cannot see and the matter that we do see including stars nebulae galaxies planets and ultimately all the things we do see is only 5 % of matter in the universe the rest consists of dark matter and energy. this is also something that has recently came up and astronomers do not understand what exactly dark matter is so it may take a while to get facts on something as obscure as it. On another more related topic there is the center of gravity. The center of gravity is where mass weighing in this one spot usually in the center of an object weighs down evenly in all directions and is the place where you can get the weight of an object. This essay basically states that our generation is one step away from opening the door to the many discoveries to come of the universe we live in and its up to us if we want to find out about it or not.