Cepheid variable star

How Far Away are Galaxies?

/ Emma / Leave a comment

Well, I’ll give you a spoiler: they’re ridiculously far away.

Let’s consider for a moment what a light-year actually means. It sounds like a unit of time, but it’s actually the distance that light travels in one Earth year.

Think of it this way: if your name is Bob, and you can travel a certain distance in one year, that distance could be called a Bob-year.

I know it’s strange to think of light traveling at a certain speed. When you flip a light switch, the room immediately brightens. When you shine a flashlight, its beam immediately falls across the nearest surface.

But that just goes to show how insanely fast light travels. If it takes 2 million years for light to get from one object to another…imagine how far apart those objects are?

Well, that’s the case for our home galaxy, the Milky Way, and our nearest galactic neighbor, the Andromeda Galaxy.

But…wait a second. How do we know that?

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A Universe of Galaxies

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When the earliest astronomers and philosophers looked up at the night sky, they never could have imagined a sight like this.

What if I told you there are only four single stars in this image?

That’s right. Four.

The rest are whole galaxies, full of billions of stars.

You can tell the foreground stars from the galaxies by the diffraction spikes–astronomer speak for those four bright spikes of light. Can you find them?

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The Milky Way Demystified

/ Emma / 7 Comments

Alright, people…time to finish off our exploration of the Milky Way Galaxy, our home in the cosmos!

For the past nine weeks, we’ve covered everything from how our galaxy was “discovered” to how it may have formed. But there’s so much more to explore–and, starting next week, we’ll begin covering the vast universe of galaxies beyond our own!

But before we do that…I want to wrap up our discussion of our own galaxy with an overview to tie the last nine posts together.

(By the way, has anyone noticed I actually managed to chug out a post a week for the entire Milky Way “module”? I’m a bit impressed with myself for that!)

Anyway…on to the Milky Way!

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How Big is the Milky Way?

/ Emma / 7 Comments

How big is our galaxy, anyway?

And more than that–how do we know?

Consider that we can’t really take a photo like this of our galaxy. We’re inside it, and space travel has not advanced to the point where we can leave it just yet. There’s no way we can get a camera out to take a picture from this perspective.

Most things in the universe–like stars, planets, and even other galaxies–can be measured using their angular diameters. That is, we use trigonometry to find their actual sizes based on how large they appear to us in the sky.

But that doesn’t work for an object that we’re inside of.

In order measure the size of our own galaxy, early astronomers had to get a bit creative–with variable stars.

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What are Variable Stars?

/ Emma / 3 Comments

What if I told you that the “two” stars you see here are actually one and the same?

This star, known as L Carinae after its location in the southern constellation Carina, is actually what we call a variable star. It is fairly bright, and its brightness varies significantly. And it’s not alone.

You might be familiar with a few variable stars. Betelgeuse, the bright giant in Orion’s shoulder, was all the rage among astronomers not too long ago. Polaris, the North Star, is also a variable. So is Algol in Perseus.

We’ve actually talked about one type of variable stars before. A variable star is any star whose brightness varies significantly and repeatedly. That means that eclipsing binaries fall within the definition. Algol is this type of variable star.

Now, though, we’re interested specifically in intrinsic variables, stars whose brightness changes because of something going on internally—not because another object passes in front of them and dims their light similarly to casting a shadow, as is the case with eclipsing binaries.

But…why would a star change in brightness like that?

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