The Universe

The edge Whats beyond the edge of the universe? Well, cosmologists have learnt not to ask that question all you can say is that theres NOTHING. All of space, time, matter and everything is contained in the universe. The universe is expanding, but its not expanding into anything its better to say that space itself is expanding. You can think of it like the surface of a balloon (although the surface has to be 3D rather than 2D) - if you draw several dots on the balloon and then blow it up, the dots get further and further apart from each other. Thats whats happening with all the galaxies in the universe. Outside the edge Whats this nothingness? Well, nobody can really get their head around this! Its a thing with no dimensionality, no extension, no time, no structure, no philosophers to think about it The diameter of the so-called visible universe is about 30 billion light years, although most astrophysicists think its getting bigger all the time Scientists argue whether the universe is infinite or finite - will it continue to expand indefinitely or will it eventually stop and start to collapse back in on itself? It's all to do with the density of matter in the universe. If the universe is finite, it will collapse several billion years from now. When this happens, the cosmic background radiation (the energy remnants of the Big Bang, shown here as a colourful & pretty pattern) will gradually begin to increase. In a few million years before the Big Crunch, cosmic background radiation will have a temperature of about 400K and the night sky will become awash with a bright glow. It'll then go on getting hotter, until everything eventually vaporise...if the universe is infinite, on the other hand, matter as we know it will eventually cease to exist, as quarks begin to decay. This wouldn't happen for a very very very long time though! The universe is awash with all kinds of weird & wonderful objects - galaxies, stars, black holes, quasars, globular clusters, nebulae, pulsars, life What's the universe made of? It's made of matter, of course, and energy! Most of it is the same sort of thing you can find all around you. It's not quite that straightforward though! Scientists have found that much of the matter isn't lit up in stars or luminous gas clouds, so is dark. Additionally, they have found evidence for a strange form of dark matter quite unlike normal matter. Stranger still, there seems to be almost 10 times more of this exotic dark matter than ordinary matter! Most of the universe is made of stuff we cannot see and cannot yet comprehend. The universe is about 12 billion years old. The Local Group - A Cluster of Galaxies This is the Local Group - our corner of the universe. It contains the Milky Way. This small group of galaxies is a useful place for astronomers to study galactic dynamics and dark matter. This is a picture of the Andromeda Galaxy M31. This is our nearest large galaxy - its about 4 times as massive as the Milky Way and about 2 million light years away. There are probably about 100 billion galaxies in the Universe, and astronomers estimate that around 30 of these are in the Local Group. The biggest and brightest members of the Local Group are our own Milky Way Galaxy and the galaxies known as M31 (Andromeda) and M33. The 2 Magellanic Clouds are also bright & close. There are 7 Dwarfs in the Local Group, but theres no Snow White. The so-called 7 Dwarf galaxies are small, very faint, elliptical galaxies around the Milky Way. Astronomers have been excited to discover recently that these objects are completely dominated by dark matter. There arent any quasars in the Local Group, but there are some

strange goings on. The centre of the Milky Way, for example, mysteriously spews out jets of positrons(antimatter electrons). This jet switches on and off, periodically. The Milky Way If the Milky Way were the size of a penny, the edge of the visible universe would be 20 miles away. This is the Milky Way, which is where we live. Its made up mainly of stars, probably about 100 billion of them. When you look into the night sky and see the Milky Way, what youre seeing is the faint glow of billions of distant stars added together. Theres also some dark matter, and gas & dust spread out in clouds, or between stars in the interstellar medium. Scientists are pretty sure that the Milky Way is a flat, spiral galaxy, although its hard to get an exact idea of what it looks like overall since were always looking from inside it. Molecular clouds, used as tracers of the shape of the Milky Way, rarely stray more than 150 light years above or below its major plane. Since the diameter of the Milky Way is about 100 thousand light years, this means that its thickness is about 5 ten thousandths of its maximum size. So its flatter than a sheet of paper! Its a good job were as far out from the centre of the Milky Way as we are. Near to the centre there are some very dense interstellar dust clouds, which would drastically reduce the amount of light we receive from the sun and could bring about an ice age. Our ionosphere would be eroded and the ozone layer would disappear. Thered be a risk of bumping into some nasty, very luminous stars and supernova remnants, and thered be lethal supernova explosions within a few light years of the solar system. The Milky Way is about 100,000 light years wide. It bulges in the middle - the bulge is about 16,000 light years thick and 3,000 light years wide. Our Solar System is located in one of the outer arms of the Milky Way, called the Orion Spur. Were about 30,000 light years from the centre, and we rotate around the Milky Way once every 200,000,000 years. The Solar System This is the familiar solar system. Its basic ingredients are the Sun, the 9 surrounding planets, several dozens of moons, comets & asteroids, and the solar wind. The whole system whizzes around the centre of our home galaxy, the Milky Way, in one of its spiral arms. This graphical representation is not to scale. The Sun is very big & important, and everything in the solar system revolves around it. The immense & attractive gravitational force which it exerts on everything in the solar system keeps everything in tow, and all the planets speed around it in the same direction, and in more or less the same plane (a plane is a 2D slice through space - like an infinitely large piece of paper but without any thickness). Pluto is slightly deviant in this respect - its orbital plane is inclined at about 18 o to the elliptical, and its more eccentric than the other orbits. In other words, its orbit is even less circular & even more stretched, which means that sometimes its closer to the Sun than Neptune. The Suns a typical star. It makes up about 99.85% of all the mass in the solar system, with the planets accounting for about 0.135% of it. The interstellar medium isnt just a void of nothingness (although its a much better vacuum that we could ever achieve on Earth). Its full of various forms of energy, interplanetary dust & gas, and the solar wind.

FAQ - Frequently Asked Questions Can you tell me how to buy a star? No! Please stop asking me this! (Sorry, the rest of the questions below have much more polite answers) Where can I learn to spot the constellations? My favourite book for beginners is "The Stars: A New Way to See Them" by H.A. Rey (the Curious George author). It is very well done and entertaining too. Who discovered the first constellation? The constellations were invented, not discovered. The constellations are just distinctive and easyto-remember patterns of stars. Most of the famous ones were invented before the beginning of recorded history. Orion, for example, has a history dating to before about 4000 BC. (see "What are Constellations?" for more info) Who named the stars? All of the stars that have names (about 2-300 of them) were named between 500 and 2000+ years ago. Most of the star names in use today came from Arabic names. These days, all stars are named for their coordinates (e.g NTTS 045251+3016 is one I've worked on) by the IAU (International Astronomical Union). How is it that we can see the Milky Way galaxy and yet we are in it? Picture the Milky Way to be like a big, translucent pancake. We are in it about half way from the middle to the edge on one side. The big strip you see in the sky as the Milky Way is the light from many of the stars in our disk-shaped galaxy. The Milky Way seems to wrap around the whole sky because of the pancake-shape that surrounds us. But because of all of the gas and dust in the galaxy, it is not transparent, so we can only see about 5-10% of the way across with visible-light telescopes (radio & infrared telescopes can see farther through the dust) so the Milky Way appears about equally bright in a band around the sky. What do the numbers mean on the star pages? Right Ascension (aka RA) & Declination (Dec) are coordinates which identify a star's location in the sky. RA is similar to longitude on the Earth while Dec is like latitude. However, while Dec is measured in degrees, arc-minutes & arc-seconds, RA is measured in hours, minutes & seconds. To convert to degrees, multiply the RA by 15 (since 360 degrees divided by 24 hours is 15). More detailed explanation B & V are measures of a star's brightness through a mostly blue & mostly green filter (respectively). The brightness is measured in magnitudes, which are a somewhat complex concept. Briefly, a lower (or more negative) magnitude is brighter and a larger magnitude is fainter. It's on a logarithmic scale though. B-V is an approximate measure of the colour of a star (low means blue, high means red). Finally, spectral type is a measure of the kind of star. They go in the following order: O, B, A, F, G, K, M. O stars are typically the brightest, bluest, most massive & shortest lived stars. M stars on the other hand are often the faintest, reddest, least massive and longest lived. The Sun is a G star, so it is somewhere in the middle. The letters don't actually mean anything. They were chosen before astronomers really understood stars. The stars were classified as A, B, C, etc. Later, when star temperatures were figured out, they reordered them. The number following the letter is the subclass. For example, within G, stars are further classified from G0 to G1 through G9 from hottest to coolest. The Sun is a G2. The last letter is a Roman numeral indicating the type of star from I (super-giant) to III (giant) to V (normal, but called "dwarf") to VI (sub-dwarf). If you need more details, this info should be in any decent high school/college level textbook.

Why do stars flicker or twinkle? & Why do stars appear to change colour? It's due to turbulence in the atmosphere. It's just like how things look wavy when you look over a hot grill in the summer, only on a smaller scale. An even better analogy is that looking at stars from inside our atmosphere is like bird-watching from the bottom of a swimming pool: the ripples distort the picture. That's one of the main reasons why space telescopes, like Hubble, provide such sharp pictures. In addition to contributing turbulence, the atmosphere also acts like a prism when you look at stars near the horizon. Since the star colours get split into a rainbow plus the turbulence makes the star move around, it can appear like the star is changing colour. When I was a kid, I thought I had spotted a UFO when I saw a star do this. What does it take to be an astronomer? Almost always, you need to graduate from college and get a PhD in Physics or Astronomy. Just as an example, here's a list of the types of courses I took as an undergrad in college: 4 semesters of post-calculus math 3 semesters of intro physics 2 semesters of quantum physics 1 semester of mechanics 2 semesters of electricity and magnetism 1 semester of computational physics (i.e., computers to solve physics problems) 1 semester of solid state physics 1 semester of topics in astronomy 2 semesters of basic astrophysics 1 semester of astronomical techniques 1 semester of celestial mechanics (planetary physics) I also took 8 semesters of programming courses, although none of those were actually required for my major. I spent a good part of my first two years of grad school taking more classes (mostly astronomy, but some physics courses too). Now, as a grad student, I spend most of my time analysing data from the infrequent trips I make to telescopes and some data from a variety of space telescopes. I also spend a substantial fraction of my time writing proposals to (1) Get time on telescopes (2) Get money to pay for my trips, and (3) To the faculty explaining what I'm doing for my PhD thesis. Besides that, it takes quite a bit of time to write the papers that I hope to get published. Papers take a lot of time to write because you have to do a lot of reading to keep up on what other people have done on similar topics. That's as far as I've gotten so far, so you'll have to ask someone else what the rest of the steps are like.

Constellations (by month)

This is a list of all 88 constellations split up into the months when they are best seen in the sky. The months listed assume that you are looking at the sky at 9:00 PM. For every hour later than 9:00, add half of a month. For every hour before 9:00, subtract half a month. The constellations are typically visible for more than just one month, depending on where you are on the Earth. If you need to know exactly when a constellation is visible, check in a star atlas or on a planisphere. January Caelum Dorado Mensa Orion Reticulum Taurus Auriga Camelopardalis Canis Major Columba Gemini Lepus Monoceros Pictor Cancer Canis Minor Carina Lynx Puppis Pyxis Vela Volans Antlia Chamaeleon Crater Hydra Leo Leo Minor Sextans Ursa Major Canes Venatici Centaurus Coma Berenices Corvus Crux Musca Virgo Botes Circinus Libra Lupus Ursa Minor

February

March

April

May

June

July

Apus Ara Corona Borealis Draco Hercules Norma Ophiuchus Scorpius Serpens Triangulum Australe Corona Austrina Lyra Sagittarius Scutum Telescopium Aquila Capricornus Cygnus Delphinus Equuleus Indus Microscopium Mavo Sagitta Vulpecula Aquarius Cepheus Grus Lacerta Octans Pegasus Piscis Austrinus Andromeda Cassiopeia Phoenix Pisces Sculptor Tucana Aries Cetus Eridanus Fornax Horologium Hydrus Perseus Triangulum

August

September

October

November

December