Astronomy Essays

Saturn is popularly known for its rings but that it has dozens of icy moons, ranging from Mimas to Rhea, is of notable interest to astronomers and space scientists. This is a proposal that is on a search site to one of Saturn's moons, Titan, for life through an unmanned landing mission. Titan is the largest moon of Saturn.

The search for exoplanets is an interesting field in astronomy and will one day give humans answers to many questions of whether humans are alone in the universe. Although searching for another form of living in the universe dates back to thousands of years, the techniques to search exo-planets have only recently been developed.

The atmosphere has been evolving with the improvement or deterioration attributed to factors that are both natural and anthropogenic. In the first atmosphere, there were many gases basically the nitrogen gas found in the solar nebula. Alongside the hydrogen, there were other compounds of hydrogen which are found in the form of Saturn and Jupiter.

The Mars Exploration Rover program, which included the Spirit and Opportunity rovers is arguably the most prosperous mission ever sent to Mars. In 2003, the two rovers were separately launched to Mars and landed securely a number of months afterward. Interestingly, they were deduced to last almost three months on the Mars surface.

The OST contains provisions that would enable the enforcement of mechanisms that would address the violation of one or more international treaties on discovering and using the resources on celestial bodies. Under this treaty, there is the rule of global ownership of state parties for all space activities, whether the government or private firms conduct such activities.

Blue stragglers are possibly the result of two stars merging (see “Star Clusters“), which makes the combined mass hotter and brighter than stars on the main sequence.  The more massive hydrogen-depleted star of the merger may form a Roche lobe and dump mass unto the lower-mass star (Danforth) so that it becomes a more massive blue straggler.

The hypothesis was objected to by astronomer Kirkwood in the nineteenth century claiming that if any unstable state should set in the rotating nebula equatorial zone, such as was assumed to result in the ring detachment, it would constantly persist (Jaki 138). In other words, it would be not possible for rings to be detached apart from at particular intervals.

The ancient Babylonian astronomers were also motivated by their religious beliefs and philosophical incentive in recording the motion and appearances of heavenly bodies in the earth’s sky. Early Babylonian astronomers recorded the precession of equinoxes, eclipses, constellations, and the apparent ecliptic path movement followed by the moon, planets, and sun

The moon landing hoax conspiracy theory is just one of many theories out there involving NASA. Others suggest that the U.S. government has known about extraterrestrials for years and is plotting with them. The various theories differ in the elaborateness of their fantasy and the particulars, but they all have a great deal of scientific ignorance at their core. However, ignorance is not what motivates them.

A star is a massive, luminous ball of plasma held together by gravity. The nearest star to Earth is the Sun, which is the source of energy on Earth. Other stars are visible from Earth during the night when they are not outshone by the Sun or blocked by atmospheric phenomena. Historically, the most prominent stars were grouped together into asterisms.

Photographs taken of the Orion Nebula have shown it to have red and yellow tinges. When seen with the naked eyes it, however, appears to be of a greenish tinge. This difference in observation occurs owing to different color sensitivity by the human eye and the film negative. The film negative produces the red and yellow color owing to the emission from hydrogen gas.

Astronomy is often considered to be a significant branch of observational and empirical science, though in the context of modern science it tends to include pure theoretical approaches to a great extent. But in the ancient world astronomy often includes a lot of the cultural and religious trends. The religious trends in any culture are often determined by various features of astronomical phenomenon.

Space had always been considered as the undiscoverable before scientists realized it should be explored for the betterment of the human race. The most significant milestone is the landing on the moon. It became a possibility for scientists to develop such technology and strategy to further explore space.

This star is the 10th brightest star in the evening sky and is a B1 III blue-white giant star, about 525 light-years from our solar system. The name Hadar is Arabic for ground, soil and earth (from أل أرض - al ardh) and can also represent civilization. AGENA is Latin for “the knee.” AGENA Hadar was identified as a double star in 1935 by Joan Voête, who gave it the identifier VOU 31.

Japan wants to help build a lunar base and populate it with advanced versions of today's humanoid robots by around 2025, according to the head of the nation's space agency. Even developing nations like China and India are planning their lunar missions. In 1980, Dennis Hope spotted a loophole in the 1967 United Nations Outer Space Treaty.

The author states that the eight planets are divided into two categories; the Terrestrial and Jovian planets. Owing to their relatively small size, dense solid composition, rocky surfaces, an interior made of metals and closeness to the Sun; Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars are classified as Terrestrial planets.

Copernicus was the first astronomer to disagree. He displaced the earth from the centre of the Universe and placed sun there instead. Copernicus presented a planetary model in which the sun was placed in the centre of a planetary system while planets rotated around the sun. This model was termed the heliocentric model of planetary motion.

The altitude of the moon was measured using fists. The hand was stretched towards the horizon and a fist made. The fists were to be stacked together using both hands. This was done by putting one fist on top of the other and another on top of the other while counting until one-fist points to the moon. The total number of fists were counted and recorded.

Neil was born on 5th August 1930 in Ohio, US. His family moved a lot due to his father’s job. His mother found him to be an untroubled and serene baby evident in all his family photos that captured him being shyness. His mother read to him constantly, which instilled him with the love of books. His grandmothers loved books and they were always reading.

Expansion of the universe is a concept that was conversed in the early 1990s. It was suggested that due to gravitational force, the growth of the universe would be unhurried as time elapsed, but contrary to established opinion, and using the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), it proved that the expansion seemed to be accelerating.

The general notion on planets is that there are nine planets and several satellites within the solar system. To be specific, it is difficult for the public to consider that Pluto is no more a planet because scientific/technical parameter to define a celestial body results in utter confusion for the public.

It is essential to state that from time immemorial, the exploration of the solar system beyond the earth has been one of the main endeavors of scientists. Many scientists and importantly space organizations have come up or coming up with many discoveries and are also launching missions into interplanetary space.

An extremophile is a life form or an organism that flourishes in extreme environments. The extreme environment, in this case, includes high temperatures and high-pressure regions. Extremophile has unusual characteristics that are extraordinarily acidic; hot that would be entirely uncongenial to the complex organism.

The electromagnetism says that starlight is an electromagnetic wave. An electromagnetic wave is the couples in space-time between an electric field and a magnetic field. This physical perturbation of and electric field and a magnetic field in the Universe is well described by Maxwell’s equations.

The sun rotates east to west on its axis, like the Earth. This can be noticed by the observation of sunspots. Near the Equator, the Sun completes one rotation every 27 days. The Sun orbits around the Milky Way, along with the entire solar system. It takes the Sun about 230 million years to make one complete orbit or revolution around the galaxy. 

The author states that of all the moons that are being researched on, Europa is the only one with a high probability of harboring life. In fact, it is the only extraterrestrial body with a high likelihood of supporting life. Titan on Saturn is another moon that may support life. There are many reasons given by scientists.

In addition to the alkaline Peace rocks discovered and studied by Spirit, the new rocks found containing traces of bacteria are also considered to be igneous rocks. Further testing, including the analysis of data retrieved from NASA’s last landed mission to Mars, the Phoenix, will lead to a better understanding of the geological makeup of Mars.

NASA researchers also created a computer simulator model of the sun’s atmosphere in 2006.  “These research activities may provide information to help mitigate effects of solar storms, which can disrupt satellite orbits and electronics, interfere with radio communication and threaten astronaut safety” (Mould & Acosta, 2006). 

For many decades, scientists have embarked on searching for locations other than the earth that could possibly host extraterrestrial life. Until the 1970s, life was believed to be utterly dependent on solar energy directly from the sun. This paper aims at discovering the possibility of life on Europa, the sixth moon of Jupiter.

While humans have been trying to figure out how humans came to the earth, they have also been trying to understand the likelihood that other planets have given life to earth. Until mid-1195 it was believed that our solar system might be unique as far as the presence of Jupiter is concerned (Léger et al., 1996).

The heavenly bodies that surround our planet include a lot more than the planets and the stars. While we know that most of the space is nothing but vacuum the heavens are also filled with bits and pieces of matter which can be observed in the shape of meteors, asteroids, and comets that occasionally may be seen with the naked eye (NASA, 2007).

Titan is a world that shares many of the geological features of earth as well as many of the components that make up life on earth. Yet, it is a foreign and hostile environment that prohibits life as we know it from being established. Temperatures of minus 179 degrees Celsius keep the methane liquid and the water is frozen.

In some distant millennia, at some point in the future of humanity, we may finally meet the challenges of extraterrestrial colonization of outer solar planets. When all technological and scientific milestones are reached to effectively transplant a human population to another world, whether by faster than light transport, folding space.

The thermonuclear reaction requires both high temperature and high pressure to overcome Coulomb barrier and fuse atoms together. The high pressure is achieved in the core of the Sun due to the gravitational collapse that formed the start in the first place. With increased density comes the high temperature, because the volume of the gas is decreasing

Whereas the previous two are the perspective-related generalizations of the possibility of extraterrestrial life, Drake Equation attempts to count the possibility from a mathematical point of view. It is a mathematical formula used to calculate both the likelihood of extraterrestrials' existence and the likelihood of our being able to contact them.

Brahe, Kepler, and Newton established the laws of motion explaining the motion of objects in the earth and the universal theory of gravitation, which was further modified by the relativity theory of Einstein. Thus the heliocentric theory of the universe has come to be widely accepted by modern astronomers and physicists.

Based on the order structure of each planet around the sun, it is believed that the moon continuously orbits around the Earth as it revolves around the sun. Since the orbit of each of the planets within the solar system ellipses in different speeds and distances, the brightness of each planet as seen from the Earth varies.

Erosion is directly related to the presence of an atmosphere. It is indirectly related to the distance between the sun and planets also. Since Mercury, Venus, and the moon don’t have a well-defined atmospheric structure as that of earth, erosion may not be prominent in these planets compared to that of earth.

In other words, all the planets including our earth have come from a star and all the ingredients or materials in our earth were originated from stars. Thus all the atoms including that in our body and what we breath, the oxygen, and all the objects previously belonged to stars. In that sense, Carl Segan was right in his argument that we all are stellar stuff.   

The question, where comes and where we go has started to confuse humankind even from the beginning of human history itself. Even though religions have answers to the above questions, scientists who accept things based on scientific facts alone were not satisfied by the religious principles of human evolution on earth.

Orbital energy is the “sum of potential energy and kinetic energy of an orbiting body per unit mass”. This means that orbital energy is the energy that is a combination of potential as well as kinetic energies of the orbiting body. This is calculated for the orbiting bodies traveling in space. When the orbits are circular in shape, the energy is exactly half of the total gravity at the orbit.

The dwarf planet category comprises celestial bodies that are massive enough to have a spherical shape in the orbit around the Sun and that are not satellites. The significant factor that distinguishes a planet from a dwarf planet is the clearing of its orbit from debris and other materials whereas a dwarf planet need not fulfill this criterion.

It is evidently clear from the discussion that although Copernicus could not bring solid evidence, later the theory was cherished by other two eminent astronomers Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) and Galileo Galilei (1564-1642). Galileo invented the telescope and that was the key milestone in the growth of sun-centered theory.

The article draws attention to the discovery of 8 new planets circling their stars. In addition, the article refers to the activities of NASA's spacecraft where it has been possible to spot hundreds of planets that are almost like the Earth. Scientists have ranked these planets according to their sizes; the larger the planet, the more likely it can support life (Overbye 1).

Hubble wanted to figure out in which directions galaxies were actually moving. As Hubble observed the galaxies as they passed Earth, Hubble noted that those with longer, reddish wavelengths are moving away from us, which is known as redshifting; galaxies with shorter, bluish wavelengths are moving toward, which is called blueshifting.

Galaxies are formed from smaller ensembles of stars, gas, and dust. The underlying dark matter that clumped together in the young universe drew this matter together, often assisted by a supermassive black hole formed early in the life of the universe. This black hole became the nucleus of the galaxy

In the recent past, the space missions are characterized by miniaturized satellites that pave way for cost-effective space missions. These satellites are classified as nanosatellites and picosatellites.  This dissertation intends to explore the technology and advancements in the field of nano and picosatellites.

The paper tells that the sun is a mystery for the scientific world and most probably it will remain as it is in future also. The majority of the mass in the solar system is associated with the sun and most of the sun matter remains in the plasma stage. Sun is divided into four different parts based on the layers; core, photosphere, chromospheres, and corona.

Atomic emission spectra look at the differences in energy that are absorbed when a photon goes through changes in energy levels. Thus when the photon is absorbed, the electrons jump up in energy levels because they become more excited. This jump in energy is what scientific instruments pick up. This is achieved through lines.

It is positioned about fifty million light-years away from the Virgo galaxy. It is also known for the five thousand light-years-long jet journey from its center. According to Conroy, the research used the M87 since it is the only galaxy that had the necessary data needed. Future studies target active star-forming galaxies (Carlisle).