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#1 Eddy

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Posted 10 February 2015 - 02:30 PM

Not sure if this topic belongs here, but hey I'll take that risk and post it on here lol. I also think a topic like this existed a very long time ago, but I assume that died out, so I might as well go ahead and make a new one.

 

Anyways, most people should know that I'm really into astronomy and anything related to the universe and because of that, I really want to become an astronomer when I get older. Personally, one of my favourite things when it comes to astronomy is the many kinds of star types ranging from white dwarfs to blue hypergiant stars. Another thing I love is observing the different kinds of nebulae that exist around us, e.g. Eta Carinae, Crab Nebula (which is also a supernova remnant I believe), Eskimo Nebula etc. and observing galaxies, which look really freaking cool, like the Sombrero Galaxy, the 2 Magellanic Clouds, the Cartwheel Galaxy, 'The Mice' etc

 

tl;dr I love astronomy

 

So, are you guys interested in astronomy as well? Feel free to share anything astronomy related.


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#2 Joelmacool

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Posted 10 February 2015 - 02:35 PM

I'd like to learn a thing or two from this topic, can't wait to see what happens in this topic :D


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#3 David

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Posted 10 February 2015 - 02:37 PM

I'm slightly interested in astronomy as well, but clearly not to the extent that you do. :P

In any case, I love a lot of science topics, especially biology, chemistry, and biochemistry.

If I think of any more random astronomy questions for you like the ones I've asked you on Skype already, I'll ask you them.
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#4 Eddy

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Posted 10 February 2015 - 02:38 PM

If I think of any more random astronomy questions for you like the ones I've asked you on Skype already, I'll ask you them.

Consider that challenge accepted :P


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#5 Shane

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Posted 10 February 2015 - 03:20 PM

I'll admit, I've never looked into astronomy before. I love space, it always has fascinated me, and it has a certain kind of beauty to it. I might look into it eventually, but I don't think I'll be doing anything with it. That said, I'm more a geography and nature kind of guy.

 

But yeah, I find people who are into astronomy are some of the coolest and smartest looking people. :P


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#6 Russ

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Posted 10 February 2015 - 05:04 PM

Astronomy, you say? Have you, by any chance, seen the new picture of the Pillars of Creation (WARNING: Huge image)? If you thought the old one was cool, holy cow, this new one's incredible. Plus, they might not actually be destroyed like we previously thought, so that's good news. (There's also this IR image which is also really cool but not quite as spectacular nor as recent. And heck, while I'm at it, this ghostly one too cuz the Pillars of Creation are seriously amazing looking.)

I'm a huge fan of astronomy myself, so I figured I'd try to contribute something to this thread.
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#7 peteandwally

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Posted 10 February 2015 - 11:08 PM

When I first started graduate school, one of my projects was particle tracking. You'd take these microscopic plastic beads and inject them into cells, then watch them move in the microscope and measure their motion later on by fitting the intensity distribution in each movie frame to a 2-D Gaussian distribution and getting the centroid from the peak position. We actually wrote a paper on how to handle noise to reduce positioning error during this process, but it never really amounted to much else than that for years. Then one day, I was walking around a research day at my university and ran into an astronomer. He was tracking stars the exact same way, and we talked for like two hours about the similarity between telescope and microscope images, noise and the properties of moving objects. It's really cool how all the math can span from such a fundamental scale to such an astronomical scale.



#8 Phosphor

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Posted 10 February 2015 - 11:49 PM

You and me both, EddyTheOliveira. Back when I was just a wee lad, I became mildly interested in astronomy from watching those astronomy documentaries on TV, such as that one voiced by Carl Sagan called "Cosmos: A Personal Voyage", climaxing when I went to space camp in Huntsville, AL, in the third grade. Though my interest fizzled out after a few years. My interests in astronomy and astrophysics were reignited when I learned a about the game Kerbal Space Program, back around Easter of 2013. I picked the game up and dove into one of the deepest and most intricate space-y games out there, visually teaching me orbital mechanics and a lot about how rockets function, like how complicated rocket staging can be and how rockets work themselves. From there, I went off to actively follow space exploration news and learn as many things I could about the void, especially after inheriting my brother's (Sigtau's) astronomy book, when he finished a class in college. I, too, hope to go into the astronomy field and to someday work with NASA on the next generation of rockets, like the S.L.S. or something.

 

tl;dr: I liked astronomy, though I lost interest for a while. Kerbal Space Program reignited that interest and I hope to build my future career around astronomy.


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#9 SkyLizardGirl

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Posted 11 February 2015 - 12:16 AM

Astronomy: is alot like a Zelda classic script - if you have everything out of the right order it won't function right or not at all, in all your editors, thus is the reason we have certain planets or odd chemical structures in space - being in located near certain set locations that work to support life like nodes in order for certain 'various shelves of life' to survive evolve and thrive.

The moon simply being one of these examples. Without it, what would happen to the earth?
would the tides possibly rise? ..

also without the sun the earth would simply be reduced too an ice planet or never even be, in the first place.
Would the earth still even be here surviving if we simply oneday 'lost' our sun?

Space is constantly expanding 'by our standards' ~ outside it too other beings, the blink of an eye possibly, to their own standards.

 

When our standards change - then we may finally reach beyond the heavens and all our stressed limits. 


Edited by SkyLizardGirl, 11 February 2015 - 12:21 AM.

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#10 David

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Posted 11 February 2015 - 07:16 AM

If the moon wasn't existent, there would actually be a lot of things that would happen. Here's a list of things that would happen:
  • There would be less visible light when it is night but the stars would be much easier to see.
  • The tides of the ocean would be about 40% as large because the sun would still have its gravity to affect the oceans.
  • The Earth's axial tilt would be all over the place. Sometimes the tilt could be 0 degrees, but other times it could be almost 85 degrees during which the North Pole would basically be the equator. The reason the axial tilt would change so significantly is that the the other planet's gravities would affect Earth since there would be no Moon to counteract the gravities.The axial tilt moving too much would be catastrophic for the Earth.
  • The Earth's rotation would constantly speed up, lowering the length of one day as that happens. The reason for this is that the Moon acts as a "brake" for Earth's rotation, making it basically stay constant and not speed up.

That's all that I can remember at the moment of the top of my head, so there may be more things that happen.
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#11 Fabbrizio

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Posted 11 February 2015 - 10:33 AM

I took astronomy last semester. It was rigorous work, but the lectures never left me bored. Every time they discover a new nearby terrestrial exoplanet, my heart skips a beat, for two reasons. The first is that, no matter how we try to slow it down, we're not likely to undo the damage we've done on earth. If the human race is to have a future, we will have to find another planet to inhabit and hopefully not make the same mistakes. The second is that, if in particular a new terrestrial exoplanet is covered in water, our odds of discovering life outside earth increases. It's probably not 'intelligent life' (for lack of a better word), but it will be alive, and seeing its structure, and by extension, determining how it developed, will unlock many secrets. And if that life is 'intelligent', we can again only hope that we have learned from the past, and do not treat the indigenous species of whatever planet the way we have treated the indigenous people of foreign lands when claiming to 'discover' that land.

 

And then there are nebulae. Don't even get me started on nebulae.

 


Edited by Fabbrizio, 11 February 2015 - 10:36 AM.

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#12 Eddy

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Posted 11 February 2015 - 12:20 PM

Astronomy, you say? Have you, by any chance, seen the new picture of the Pillars of Creation (WARNING: Huge image)? If you thought the old one was cool, holy cow, this new one's incredible. Plus, they might not actually be destroyed like we previously thought, so that's good news. (There's also this IR image which is also really cool but not quite as spectacular nor as recent. And heck, while I'm at it, this ghostly one too cuz the Pillars of Creation are seriously amazing looking.)

I'm a huge fan of astronomy myself, so I figured I'd try to contribute something to this thread.

Oh crap, I've never seen these before. I gotta say, I've only seen the older images Pillars of Creation but dang that's some really cool stuff!



#13 strike

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Posted 11 February 2015 - 12:42 PM

Does astronomy have to do with the Big Bang and the expansion of the universe? If so I'm interested. I think it's pretty mysterious that the universe is expanding faster and faster.

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#14 Eddy

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Posted 11 February 2015 - 12:47 PM

Does astronomy have to do with the Big Bang and the expansion of the universe? If so I'm interested. I think it's pretty mysterious that the universe is expanding faster and faster.

-Strike

From my experience, Astronomy is a lot larger than that. It basically covers the whole universe ranging from how stars are made, to how the most extreme planets survive in the craziest conditions to much much more.



#15 Russ

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Posted 11 February 2015 - 12:57 PM

Speaking of the Big Bang and expansion of the universe, according to a recent publication, there might not have been a Big Bang at all. If they turn out to be right, not only will we have established that the Universe didn't have a beginning but simply "always was", but we'll have solved the problems of dark mater and dark energy. And of course, this means the Universe won't have an "end" in the way we think of currently. Exciting stuff, if it can be verified. It would throw modern cosmology on its head, to say the least.
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