After sleeping through a hundred million years in wisps, ashes and smoking gun, we – the rational beings developed from the Darwin's principle of natural selection − still don't fully understand space, our solar system, and the galaxy. The entire cosmos, of which the planet Earth and the human species are a part, is made up of space, time, matter, and energy. Astronomers' understanding of the cosmos is always changing since there are billions of stars and galaxies, as well as stormy planets, exploding stars and weird black holes in our own galaxy that have not yet been thoroughly examined or defined. But we – a hoard of talking monkeys whose consciousness is from a collection of connected neurons – do currently know some extremely interesting things about the universe.
How did the Universe begin? What elements make up stars? What is the true nature of the universe? Have there ever been inhabitants of Mars? How many moons could fit inside earth? From its accelerated expansion to dark matter and energy, the universe continues to amaze and perplex us. The size of the cosmos is unknown, but one thing is for certain: it is vast. The concept of something so enormous can make our existence on the planet Earth feel insignificant because there is obviously a lot of exciting stuff going on in there. This book takes us on a voyage across the galaxy, visiting all the planets, the Moon, the Sun, stars, black holes, comets, asteroids, and more. This is a great addition to your bookshelf whether you are working on an astronomical assignment or you simply want to learn more about our amazing universe.
Excerpt:
- A light-year is the unit of length used to express astronomical distances and is the distance covered by light in a single year and is equal to 9.46×1012 km.
- The Sun accounts for 99.86% of the mass in the solar system and weighs about 330,000 times more than Earth.
- Our solar system is 4.568 billion years old formed from the gravitational collapse of a giant interstellar molecular cloud.
- The highest mountain discovered is the Olympus Mons, which is an enormous shield volcano on the planet Mars.
- Because of lower gravity, a person who weighs 100kg on Earth would only weigh 38 kg on the surface of Mars.
- The Sun has a north and south pole, just as the Earth does, and makes a full rotation once every 25 – 35 days.
- Earth is the third planet from the Sun and the only planet not named after a God.
- The surface of Venus is dominated by volcanic features and has more volcanoes than any other planet in the Solar System.
- Uranus' blue glow is due to the cold methane gas in its atmosphere.
- In our solar system that are 4 planets which don't have hard surfaces and instead have swirling gases above a solid core − known as gas giants: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.
- Uranus is an Ice Giant planet and nearly four times larger than Earth and has 27 moons that have been discovered so far.
- When an electron and a positron approach each other, they annihilate i.e., destroy each other. This process what a quantum physicists call the mass annihilation. During the process their masses are converted into energy in accordance with E = mc2. The energy
- thus released manifests as γ photons.
- A photon of energy hυ = mc2 generated at the center of the star makes its way to the
- surface. It may take up to several million years to get to the surface.
- Because of its unique tilt, each season on Uranus lasts 21 earthly years and makes a huge difference between winter-summer and autumn-spring.
- riton is the largest of Neptune's 13 moons and orbits the planet backwards.
- There are more stars in space than there are grains of sand in the world and there exist roughly 10,000 stars for each grain of sand on Earth.
- As photon travel near the event horizon of a black hole they can still escape being pulled in by gravity of a black hole by traveling at a vertical direction known as exit cone. A photon on the boundary of this cone will not completely escape the gravity of the black hole. Instead it orbits the black hole.
- Tachyons are theoretically postulated hypothetical particles that always travel faster than light and have 'imaginary' masses.
- Neptune is 17 times the mass of Earth and takes nearly 165 Earth years to make one orbit of the Sun.
- Pluto's largest moon, Charon − also known as Pluto I, is half the size of the dwarf planet Pluto.
- A day on Pluto is 6.4 Earth days or 153.3 hours long.
- Saturn is the second largest planet in our solar system and a gas giant with an average radius of about nine times that of Earth.
- The inner planets or rocky and terrestrial planets − Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars are the four planets that orbit closest to the Sun.
- Only 5% of the universe is visible from Earth.
- It takes sunlight an average of 8 minutes and 20 seconds to travel from the Sun to the Earth.
- There are three main types of galaxies: elliptical, spiral and irregular.
- There are about 100 thousand million stars in the Milky Way alone.
- The Andromeda Galaxy is a barred spiral galaxy approximately 2.5 million light-years from Earth and the nearest major galaxy to the Milky Way.
- The warp and twist of space-time near the earth. The Moon follows this warp of space- time as it orbits Earth.
- The astronomical unit is a unit of length, roughly the distance from Earth to the Sun and equal to about 150 million kilometers (93 million miles) or ~8 light minutes.
- Astronauts can grow approximately two inches (5 cm) in height when in space.