About Astronomy
The sky stretches out endlessly and the spaces between things can be large.
At first glance, stars seem like little dots of light in the sky. However, they’re actually massive, fiery spheres of gas, similar to our Sun. They only seem small because they’re incredibly far from us. The closest star to our solar system is about 4 light years away, which is a staggering 20 trillion miles. While it might look like all the stars are at the same distance, that’s just an illusion. In reality, some stars are tens of thousands of light years farther from Earth than others.
Space is always in motion, everything is constantly moving.
We are not sitting still, in reality, we’re zooming through space at an incredible speed! If you were standing at the equator, you’d be rotating at about a thousand miles per hour along with the ground beneath you. Earth is also orbiting the Sun at a whopping 67,000 miles per hour. Plus, the Sun is moving around the center of our galaxy, dragging the entire solar system along at a staggering 490,000 miles per hour. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is racing through space at 872,405 miles per hour.
Gravity keeps everything together.
We don’t just fly off the Earth, even though it spins so fast Gravity is the force that pulls everything together in the universe. The strength of an object’s gravity is based on its mass, which is basically how much “stuff” it has. The heavier the object, the stronger its gravitational pull. Plus, the closer two objects are to each other, the more they attract one another. Gravity is what keeps us grounded and ensures that Earth and the other planets stay in orbit around the Sun instead of drifting away.
Our eyes can only see a small amount of the light spectrum.
Light is a kind of energy called electromagnetic radiation. There’s a whole spectrum of that electromagnetic radiation, and we can only see a tiny bit of it! In space, some of the radiation that can be seen is infrared, microwaves, ultraviolet, etc. In order to be able to see them, we have to use special equipment like different kinds of telescopes.
The universe is full of weird amazing stuff.
In our universe, there are some things that we aren’t able to detect with any known methods. These things are called dark matter/energy. We know it exists because it has gravitational pull. It works against gravity to push matter apart. Researchers don’t know much about this matter, but they’re working hard on figuring it out!
It takes a big team for astronomy research.
To research space, a big team full of different professions is needed, each with their own specialties. To name a few, there are observational astronomers, planetary astronomers, cosmologist, and more. Some are able to write computer programs, some are able to solve equations, and others know how to build things.