ASTRONOMY – Chapter 1 Notes

CONSEQUENCES OF LIGHT TRAVEL TIME

Speed of light is such a natural unit of distance for astronomers as information about the universe comes to us
almost exclusively through various forms of light. For a star 500 light-years away, the light we detect tonight
left 500 years ago and is carrying 500-year old news.

Because many of us are accustomed to instant news from the Internet, some might find this frustrating.

If astronomers really want to piece together what has happened in the universe since its beginning, they must
find evidence about each epoch (or period of time) of the past. Where can we find evidence today about cosmic
events that occurred billions of years ago?

This is one reason why astronomers strive to build telescopes that can collect more and more of the faint light
in the universe.

A TOUR OF THE UNIVERSE

Earth is a nearly spherical planet about 13,000 kilometers in diameter. The Moon’s distance from Earth is
about 30 times Earth’s diameter, or approximately 384,000 kilometers, and it takes about a month for the
Moon to revolve around Earth. The Moon’s diameter is 3476 kilometers, about one fourth the size of Earth.

Light takes 1.3 seconds to travel between Earth and the Moon.
During Apollo flights to the Moon, you may recall that there was a delay of about 3 seconds between the time
Mission Control asked a question and the time the astronauts responded, Why?

Earth revolves around the Sun, which is about 150 million kilometers away—approximately 400 times as far
away from us as the Moon. We call the average Earth–Sun distance an astronomical unit (AU) because, in the
early days of astronomy, it was the most important measuring standard. Light takes slightly more than 8
minutes to travel 1 astronomical unit,

The diameter of the Sun is about 1.5 million kilometers. If the Sun were reduced to the size of a basketball,
Earth would be a small apple seed about 30 meters from the ball. Proxima Centauri, the nearest star beyond
the Sun (Its diameter is about one-seventh the diameter of the Sun) which is 4.3 light-years away, would be
almost 7000 kilometers from the basketball.

It takes Earth 1 year (3 x 107 seconds) to go around the Sun at our distance; to make it around, we must travel
at approximately 110,000 kilometers per hour.

Earth is only one of eight planets that revolve around the Sun.

(credit: modification of work by NASA)

A planet is defined as a body of significant size that orbits a star and does not produce its own light.

A star is an enormous ball of glowing gas that generate vast amounts of energy by nuclear reactions deep
within.

The Sun is one of hundreds of billions of stars that make up the Milky Way Galaxy;
• Within a sphere 10 light-years in radius centered on the Sun, we find roughly ten stars.
• Within a sphere 100 light-years in radius, there are roughly (104) stars.
• Within a 1000-light-year sphere, we find some (107) stars.
• Within a sphere of 100,000 light-years, we finally encompass the entire Milky Way Galaxy.
• The Sun is less than 30,000 light-years from the center of the Galaxy,

The space between the stars is not completely empty. It contains a sparse distribution of gas (mostly the
simplest element, hydrogen) intermixed with tiny solid particles that we call interstellar dust. This gas and
dust collect into enormous clouds in many places in the Galaxy, becoming the raw material for future
generations of stars.

The interstellar material building up over thousands of light-years, can block the light of more distant stars.
Luckily, astronomers have found that stars and raw material shine with various forms of light, some of which
do penetrate the smog, and so we have been able to develop a pretty good map of the Galaxy.

Much of our Galaxy is made of material we cannot currently observe directly with our instruments. We
therefore call this component of the Galaxy dark matter. We know the dark matter is there by the pull its
gravity exerts on the stars and raw material we can observe.

Many stars born in double or triple systems with two, three, or more stars revolving about each other. Some
of the largest of the star clusters that astronomers have cataloged contain hundreds of thousands of stars and
take up volumes of space hundreds of light-years across.

This large star cluster is known as M9. It contains 250,000 stars

and is seen more clearly from space using the Hubble Space Telescope.
It is located roughly 25,000 light-years away.

(credit: NASA, ESA)

In fact, no star can last forever “eternal.” Ultimately, the Sun and all stars will die,
as eventually all-stars run out of fuel. Our Sun still has at least 5 or 6 billion years to
go. These stars exploded at the ends of their lives, recycling their material back into
the reservoir of the Galaxy.
THE UNIVERSE ON THE LARGE SCALE

We define the universe to be everything that exists that is accessible to our observations. Galaxies do look like
islands of stars in the vast, dark seas of intergalactic space.

The nearest galaxy, discovered in 1993, is a small one that lies 75,000 light-years from the Sun in the
direction of the constellation Sagittarius, where the smog in our own Galaxy makes it especially difficult to
discern.

Beyond this Sagittarius dwarf galaxy lie two other small galaxies, about 160,000 light-years away. These are
called the Magellanic Clouds. All three of these small galaxies are satellites of the Milky Way Galaxy.

The nearest large galaxy is a spiral quite similar to our own, it is called the Andromeda galaxy (its catalog
number M31). It is a little more than 2 million light-years away and, along with the Milky Way, is part of a
small cluster of more than 50 galaxies referred to as the Local Group.

At distances of 10 to 15 million light-years, we find other small galaxy groups, and then at about 50 million
lightyears there are thousands of member galaxies. We have discovered that galaxies occur mostly in clusters.
Some of the clusters themselves form into larger groups called superclusters.

The Local Group is part of a supercluster of galaxies, called the Virgo Supercluster, which stretches over a
diameter of 110 million lightyears.

At even greater distances we find quasars. These are brilliant centers of galaxies, glowing with the light of an
extraordinarily energetic process. The enormous energy of the quasars is produced by gas that is heated to a
temperature of millions of degrees as it falls toward a massive black hole and swirls around it. They allow us
to probe the universe 10 billion light-years away. Measurements of the properties of galaxies and quasars in
remote locations require large telescopes.

THE UNIVERSE OF THE VERY SMALL

The universe is extraordinarily large and extraordinarily empty. On average, it is 10,000 times emptier than
our Galaxy. The air we breathe has about 1019 atoms in each cubic centimeter—and we usually think of air as
empty space. In the interstellar gas of the Galaxy, there is about one atom in every cubic centimeter. To find
one atom, on average, we must search through a cubic meter of space.

Molecules are the smallest particles into which any matter can be divided while still retaining its chemical
properties Molecules, in turn, are built of atoms, which are the smallest particles of an element that can still
be identified as that element. Nearly 100 different kinds of atoms (elements) exist in nature. Most of them
are rare, and only a handful account for more than 99% of everything with which we come in contact.

The most abundant elements in the cosmos today are listed in the following Table; think of this table as the
“greatest hits” of the universe when it comes to elements.
The Cosmically Abundant Elements
All atoms consist of a central, positively charged nucleus surrounded by negatively charged electrons. The
bulk of the matter in each atom is found in the nucleus, which consists of positive protons and electrically
neutral neutrons all bound tightly together in a very small space. Each element is defined by the number of
protons in its atoms.

The distance from an atomic nucleus to its electrons is typically 100,000 times the size of the nucleus itself.
This is why we say that even solid matter is mostly space. The typical atom is far emptier than the solar system
out to Neptune. (The distance from Earth to the Sun, for example, is only 100 times the size of the Sun.)

physicists have discovered that everything that happens in the universe, from the smallest atomic nucleus to
the largest superclusters of galaxies, can be explained through the action of only four forces: gravity,
electromagnetism, weak and strong nuclear forces.

A CONCLUSION AND A BEGINNING

Learning astronomy is a little like learning a new language: at first it seems there are so many new expressions
that you’ll never master them all, but with practice, you soon develop facility with them.

Let us consider the history of the universe from the Big Bang to today and compress it, for easy reference,
into a single year. On this scale, the Big Bang happened at the first moment of January 1, and this moment,
when you are reading these notes would be the end of the very last second of December 31. When did other
events in the development of the universe happen in this “cosmic year?” Our solar system formed around
September 10, and the oldest rocks we can date on Earth go back to the third week in September.

Charting Cosmic Time

The origin of human beings turns out to be the evening of December 31. The invention of the alphabet doesn’t
occur until the fiftieth second of 11:59 p.m. on December 31. And the beginnings of modern astronomy are a
mere fraction of a second before the New Year. Seen in a cosmic context, the amount of time we have had to
study the stars is minute, and our success in piecing together as much of the story as we have is remarkable.
Certainly, our attempts to understand the universe are not complete. As new technologies and new ideas allow
us to gather more and better data about the cosmos, our present picture of astronomy will very likely undergo
many changes.