Star Astronomy For Newbies

Astronomy in general is a huge subject, as vast as the universe it describes.  Limiting to star astronomy still leaves a lot of things to cover.  There are ample phenomenon and objects in just our own solar system to keep someone bust for an entire life time.  Some people, then, decide to become experts on the stars.

Our sun is 94,000,000 miles from Earth, and that’s the closest star we know.  It generates an amazing amount of heat to reach all that distance.  98% of the stuff in our solar system is in the sun.  That takes into account everything, the rocks, material, even the very large Jupiter and Saturn in all their moons.  It would take 109 Earths to span the sun’s disk, and over 1.3 million Earths would fit within the sun.  The nuclear reaction at the Sun’s core comes from pressure 340 billion times that at sea level on earth and temperatures of over 27,000,000°F.  That would burn a pizza in a second.

The sun is the most studied star we know.  It would take 250,000 times longer to get to the next nearest sun.  But the interesting part of star astronomy is there’s so much to work with beyond our own solar system.  A human can see about 5000 stars, all in our own Milky Way galaxy, from Earth.  Using telescope, a person can see far more of the 1×10^22 stars estimated in the universe.  For those who care that’s a 1 followed by 22 zeros.  Hundreds of thousands of stars come into view even with an amateur telescope.  Imagine that!  Larger telescopes can see other galaxies that contain an estimated total of over 200 billion stars. It’s a project of generations just to count each one.

Scientists now know, through star astronomy, that many stars and planets orbiting them.  They know this first through measuring the wobble caused to stars by planets and other objects orbiting them.  For the first time, in 2008, astronomers took images of distant solar systems.  We are ever closer to finding intelligent life.

Is an intergalactic war in our near future?  Not likely.  But star astronomy will keep on going.  We might be under observation from one of those distant planets!

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