Easy Astronomy Blog

What exactly is the definition of astronomy?

Astronomy can be defined like this :

The scientific study of the universe and the objects in it, including stars, planets, nebulae, and galaxies. Astronomy deals with the position, size, motion, composition, energy, and evolution of celestial objects. Astronomers analyze not only visible light but also radio waves, x-rays, and other ranges of radiation that come from sources outside the Earth’s atmosphere.

So basically, astronomy is the study of everything that is in outer space including stars, planets, constellations, comets, the solar system, etc. It is a fascinating science that more and more people are constantly interested in. These people are called astronomers. They observe outer space with tools like cameras, binoculars and telescopes.

If astronomy interests you and you don’t have much equipment to observe the night sky, you might be interested in taking a look at my Orion Skyquest XT8 telescope review.

Astronomy is a topic as wide as the universe that it seeks to discover. Limiting to star astronomy still leaves a lot of things to cover. It would take a lifetime just to learn about all the objects that orbit our own small sun. Some people, then, decide to become experts on the stars.

The closest star we know is our sun, about 94,000,000 miles away from our very own planet. Its heat is staggering when the quantity of heat the earth receives from it over this amazing distance is realized. 98% of the stuff in our solar system is in the sun. That includes all the other planets even with huge Jupiter and Saturn on our side. The sun could hold over 1.3 million Earths. The nuclear reaction at the Sun’s centre comes from pressure 340 billion times that at sea level on earth and temperatures of over 27,000,000°F. That would burn toast to a crisp instantly.

The sun is the most studied star we know. It would take 250,000 times longer to get to the next nearest sun. Star astronomy gets interesting when you consider all of those stars out there. A human can see about 5000 stars, all in our own Milky Way galaxy, from Earth. More of the 1×10^22 stars in the universe can be seen through a telescope. If you’re counting that’s a one followed by 22 zeros. In fact, even a small telescope opens the eyes of an amateur star astronomy enthusiast to hundreds of thousands of stars. Imagine that! Professionals using larger telescopes can see other galaxies that contain over 200 billion stars. Just counting that many is a lifetime of work.

Star astronomy experts have now proven that many other stars have planets. They know this first through measuring the wobble caused to stars by planets and other objects orbiting them. And in late 2008 astronomers finally took the first pictures of planets orbiting other stars, and even of entire solar systems. Maybe one of those planets contains intelligent life.

Will we have a run-in with Romulans next month? Not likely. But star astronomy will keep on going. Maybe it also continues somewhere on another planet We might be under observation from one of those distant planets!