Astronomy – AstroAthens

I want everyone to understand WHY astronomy is so cool, and in my opinion a necessary subject to understand! From particle physics to massive celestial bodies, astronomy is the true natural science that studies the most beautiful wonder in our lives: THE UNIVERSE.

And why do I feel this is SO important? Because we are MADE OF the same exact elements as anything that is found outside our planet. So, essentially, our bodies are linked with our wonderful expanding universe.

All the elements that make up stars, planets, dust clouds in nebulae, asteroids, the rings of Saturn, etc. are the same elements that make up our blood, our bones, and all the atoms in our bodies. To me, this is a thousand open doors to understanding who we are as one entire species. It’s time to unify under the umbrella of science.

When I began to learn about astronomy and physics back in high school, I started to become so open minded. You begin to look at our physical world in a completely different way than ever before. You begin to notice gravity everywhere (9.8 m/s^2), the way sound travels when a car goes by (The Doppler Effect), every action resulting in a reaction (Newton’s Third Law), or maybe you just begin to look up at the sky more often. Curiosity begins to grow, the mind starts wandering and dreaming up “what-if’s”. Often times when we begin to day dream about something that seems unexplained, we start to create assumptions to explain such thoughts. When all along, there may be some theory or research to make logic of it.

Take our physical world…

Zoom in to the smallest living thing you can think of. Now zoom into its body, how does it function? How does it move? What is needed for it to be alive? Got it? Now you might have possibly thought of 3 key elements: air, water and the Sun. This is where biology begins. Life itself began to form from these elements (in addition to many others) but for now lets stick to these 3. Air (oxygen), water (oxygen and hydrogen) and the Sun (hydrogen, helium, oxygen, carbon, neon, nitrogen, magnesium, iron and silicon).

If your living thing consists of lungs, air is necessary to breathe and live longer than a few minutes. If your living thing doesn’t need to breathe, possibly its a simple bacteria that thrives in water. Now, if your living thing had no water, it would have never existed. Now, lets look at our Sun, long before your living thing, and our planet existed. We had space, filled with gas and dust, possibly from a nearby supernova explosion (death of a star). These dust particles and gas began to accumulate, gravity began to rotate these particles. Over time, these spinning materials began to form a flattened disk, where in the center a newborn star began to form. And once again, over time this star began to expand, gaining its own gravity, nearby dust and materials began to orbit the star, materials accumulating, colliding and forming rocky planets.

This is fascinating to me. This is why I began my studies and research. I want to get this information out to everyone. People who hear about science and are used to getting confused the second scientific vocabulary is used usually discard it. But there are amazing wonders when it comes to physics and astronomy, and I just simply want to share its knowledge with whoever will listen. Because after all, everything that we are today is worth trying to understand for the sake of tomorrow. We are the basis for our future, and the future for our species.