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Astronomy is as large as the universe that it seeks to discover.  Star astronomy is just one part of the overall science and hobby.  There are ample phenomenon and objects in just our own solar system to keep someone bust for an entire life time.  Some people, then, decide to become experts on the stars.

Our sun is 94,000,000 miles from Earth, and that’s the closest star we know.  It generates an amazing amount of heat to reach all that distance.  The sun contains about 98% of the mass in our entire solar system.  That includes all the other planets even with huge Jupiter and Saturn on our side.  It would take 109 Earths to span the sun’s disk, and over 1.3 million Earths would fit within the sun.  The heat is generated from a nuclear reaction in the sun’s core where the pressure is 340 billion times the pressure on Earth and temperatures reach 27,000,000F.  Try that for a grill, George Foreman.

Since it’s so close to Earth, relatively compared to other suns, the Sun is the most thoroughly studied star.  It’s about 250,000 times closer to Earth than the next known star.  But the interesting part of star astronomy is there’s so much to work with beyond our own solar system.  From the Earth about 5,000 stars, every one in our own Milky Way galaxy, can be seen with the naked eye.  With telescopes many more of the over 1 x 10^22 stars in the universe (that’s an estimate) can be seen.  If you’re counting that’s a one followed by 22 zeros.  Hundreds of thousands of stars come into view even with an amateur telescope.  That is amazing!  Larger telescopes can see other galaxies that contain an estimated total of 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.  In 2008, for the first time, astronomers took visible light photographs of planets orbiting distant suns.  That means yet another step taken towards verifying the existence of other intelligent life out there somewhere in the universe.

Will Vulcans or Klingons visit us tomorrow?  Not likely.  Star astronomy continues, however.  We might be under observation from one of those distant planets!

Tags: Astronomy, Earth, Jupiter, Milky Way, Saturn, Solar System, Star, Sun

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