Astronomy in general is a huge subject, as vast as the universe it describes. 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. Many people decide, then, to specialize, to focus their attention on the brightest objects that are often the first space objects that peak people’s interest in astronomy ? the stars.
Star astronomy begins about 94 million miles from Earth, with our own sun. Its heat is staggering when the amount of heat the earth receives from it over that great distance is realized. Our own sun contains just over 98% of the total mass in the solar system. That’s compared to all the planets, moons, space rocks and other material. 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. That would burn a pizza in a second.
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. By the way, that’s a 1 followed by 22 zeros. In fact, even a small telescope opens the eyes of an amateur star astronomy enthusiast to hundreds of thousands of stars. Imagine that! Larger telescopes can see other galaxies that contain an estimated total of over 200 billion stars. It’s a project of generations just to count each one.
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. And in late 2008 astronomers finally took the first pictures of planets orbiting other stars, and even of entire solar systems. 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? Probably not. But star astronomy and its study of our own Sun and all the stars in the universe will continue. Maybe it also continues somewhere on another planet!
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