Introduction to Astronomy: What is Astronomy? Astronomy VS Astrology

11 min readOct 9, 2022

Astronomy is an instinctive science that concentrates on divine items and peculiarities. It utilizes arithmetic, material science, and science to make sense of their starting point and advancement. Items of interest in space include planets, moons, stars, nebulae, worlds, galaxies, and comets.

Introduction To Astronomy

what is astronomy? Astronomy is the body of knowledge and a method of how we learned that knowledge

Hello, and welcome to Space Explore! You might want to pack a lunch. Over the article of this series, we’ll explore planets, stars, black holes, galaxies, subatomic particles, and even the eventual fate of the Universe itself. But before jumping into space, let’s take a look back. I wanna talk to you about science.

There is a variety of meanings of science, yet I’ll say that it’s a collection of information and a strategy for how we discovered that information. Science lets us know that stuff we know may not be impeccably known; it could be incompletely or altogether off-base. We want to watch the Universe, perceive how it acts, make surmises about why it doing its doing this, and afterward attempt to consider ways of supporting or disproving those ideas. That last part is important.

Science should be, regardless of anything else, legit if we truly need to make quick work of things. Understanding that our comprehension may be off-base is fundamental, and attempting to sort out the manners in which we might be mixed up is the main way that science can assist us with tracking down our direction to reality, or if nothing else the closest estimation to it. Science learns.

We meander a bit as we use it, but in the long run, we get ever closer to understanding reality, and that is the strength of science. And it’s all around us! Whether you know it or not, you’re soaking in science. You’re a primate. You have mass.

Mitochondria in your cells are generating energy. Presumably, you’re breathing oxygen. But astronomy is different. It’s still science, obviously, yet cosmology takes care of you.

What is Astronomy

Because of astronomy, I do know we’re standing on a sphere of mostly molten rock and metal 13,000 kilometers across, with a fuzzy atmosphere about 100 km high, surrounded by a flux that protects us from the onslaught of subatomic particles from the Sun 150 million km away, which is additionally flooding space with light that reaches across space, to illuminate the planets, asteroids, dust, and comets, racing out past the Kuiper Belt, through the accumulation, into a part, past the closest stars, which orbit together with gas clouds and mud lanes in an exceedingly gigantic galaxy.
We call the galaxy that includes a supermassive region in its center and is surrounded by 150 globular clusters and a halo of matter and dwarf galaxies, a number of which it’s eating, all of which might be seen by other galaxies in our Local Group like Andromeda and Triangulum, and our group is on the outskirts of the Virgo galaxy cluster.

Which is an element of the Virgo supercluster, which is simply one in all many other gigantic structures that stretch most of the way across the visible Universe, which is 90 billion light years across and expanding daily, even faster today than yesterday because of mysterious dark energy, and even all which may be a part of an infinitely larger multiverse that extends forever both in time and space.

See? Astronomy puts you in your home. But what exactly is astronomy? this is not necessarily a visible thing to ask. once I was a child, it absolutely was easy: Astronomy is the study of things within the sky. The sun, moon, stars, galaxies. But it isn’t very easy to pigeonhole nowadays. Take, for instance, Mars.

When I haul my ‘scope resolute to the top of my driveway and appearance at Mars, that’s astronomy, right? Of course! But what about the rovers there? Those machines aren’t doing astronomy, surely. They’re doing science, chemistry geography, hydrology, petrology… everything except cosmology! So nowadays, what’s astronomy? I’d say it’s still studying stuff within the sky, but it’s branched out quite a bit from there.

Borders between it and other fields of science are fuzzy… a subject matter i will be hitting on several times over this series. People could like a firm, portrayed limits between things, however, nature isn’t all that fussy.

Who Studies Astronomy

Furthermore, that carries us to our most memorable version of “Spotlight On… “ The current week’s point: Space experts! Who are we? What do we do? I used to glance through telescopes professionally, or possibly concentrate on the information that came from locators tied onto them. But now I talk and write (and make videos) about astronomy, and relegate my viewing to my personal backyard telescope.

However, I actually view myself as a cosmologist, so that ought to give you a thought that there’s a ton of leeway in the calling. In fact, when I worked on Hubble Space Telescope, I was actually hired as… a programmer!

I coded in the language utilized by the people assisting with building and aligning a camera that was because of send off into space and introduced to Hubble by a space traveler. When the information from that camera is taken and examined, you need to understand how to manage them. Do the perceptions fit the actual model of how stars explode, how systems structure, or the manner in which gas moves through space? Indeed, you better know your math and physical science, since that is the manner by which we test our speculations.

What’s more, somebody who does that is by and large called an astrophysicist. Of course, those telescopes and detectors don’t create themselves.

We really want specialists to plan and fabricate them and professionals to utilize them. Most cosmologists don’t really utilize the actual telescopes any longer; somebody who’s prepared for their particular use does that for them. Some of those instruments go into space, and some go to other worlds, like the moon and Mars. We want stargazers and architects and programming developers who can assemble those, as well. And afterward, toward the finish of this, we really want individuals to fill you in regarding it.

Teachers, professors, writers, video makers, and even artists. So listen for a minute: In the event that you have an interest in the Universe, on the off chance that you love to gaze toward the stars, on the off chance that you desire to grasp what’s going on literally over your head, then who am I to say you’re not an astronomer?

Origins of Astronomy

Anyway, you characterize stargazing, people have been gazing toward the sky however long we’ve been people. Certainly, ancient people noticed the big glowy ball in the sky, how it lit everything up while it was up, and how it got dark when it was gone. The other, fainter glowy thing attempted, yet wasn’t exactly on par with illuminating the evening.

They most likely likewise saw that when certain stars showed up overhead, the weather conditions began getting hotter and the days longer, and when different stars were seen, the climate started getting warmer and the days longer, and when other stars were seen, the weather would get colder and daytime shorten. Also, when people settled down, found agribusiness, and began cultivating, seeing those themes overhead would have had a significantly more noteworthy effect.

It told them when to plant seeds, and when to harvest. The cycles in the sky became pretty important. So critical that it wasn’t difficult to envision divine beings up there, peering down on us frail and absurd people, disrupting our lives.

Astrology vs Astronomy

Certainly, on the off chance that the stars let us know when to plant, and control the climate, seasons, and the length of the day, they control our lives as well… and soothsaying was conceived.

Astrology literally means “study of the stars”; as a word, it’s been used before science became a formal method of studying nature. It irks me a bit, since it got the good name, and now we’re stuck with “astronomy,” which means “law or culture of the stars.” That’s not really what we do! But what the heck?

Words change importance over the long haul, and presently it’s essentially perceived that stargazing is science, and crystal gazing… isn’t. Millennia ago, astrology was as close to science as you got. It had a portion of the kinds of science: soothsayers noticed the skies, made expectations about what it would mean for individuals, and afterward those individuals would give proof to it by swearing up and down it worked.

Truly, it truly didn’t; the shortcoming of crystal gazing lies in ourselves and not our stars. People tend to remember the hits and forget the misses when predictions are made, which is why they sometimes sit in casinos pumping nickels into machines that are proven to be nothing more than a method for reducing the number of nickels you have.

But astrology, Be that as it may, crystal gazing prompted individuals to truly concentrate on the sky, and find the examples there, which prompted a more thorough comprehension of how things functioned in the wonderful vault.

It wasn’t overnight, of course. This took centuries. Before the invention of the telescope, sharp eyewitnesses constructed a wide range of odd and great gadgets to quantify the sky, and as a matter of fact, it was before the telescope was first gone to the sky that a tremendous upheaval in stargazing occurred.

Geocentrism

It is thoroughly clear that the ground you stand on is fixed, established maybe, and the skies turn above us. The moon rises and sets, and the actual stars wheel around the sky in the evening time. Obviously, the Earth is unmoving, and the sky is the thing that is really moving.

As a matter of fact, looking at the situation objectively, geocentrism checks out that every one of the items overhead rotates about the Earth, and is fixed to a progression of settled circles, some of which are straightforward, perhaps made of precious stone, which turns one time each day. However, the stars may simply be openings in the generally obscure circle, letting daylight. Sounds silly to you, doesn’t it? Well, here’s the thing:

If you don’t have today’s modern understanding of how the cosmos works, this whole multiple-shells-of-things-in- the-sky thing actually does make sense. It makes sense of a great deal of what’s happening over your head, and on the off chance that it was sufficient for Plato, Aristotle, and Ptolemy, by god it was sufficient for you. And speaking of which, it was endorsed by the major religions of the time, so maybe it’s better if you just nod and agree and don’t think about it too hard.

Revolutions in Astronomy

But a few centuries ago things changed.

the Polish mathematician and astronomer Copernicus came up with the idea that the sun was the center of the solar system, not the Earth.

In spite of the fact that he wasn’t the first, the Clean mathematician and cosmologist Copernicus concocted the possibility that the sun was the focal point of the planetary group, not the Earth. His thoughts had issues, which we’ll get to in a later episode, however it improved than geocentrism.

Tycho Brahe who modified that system, making it even better in astronomy

And afterward along came Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler, who altered that framework, making it surprisingly better.

Johannes Kepler who has played important role in astronomy

Isaac Newton — oh, Newton — he invented calculus partly to help him understand the way objects moved in space.

Then, at that point, Isaac Newton — goodness, Newton — he created analytics somewhat to assist him with understanding the manner in which articles moved in space. After some time, our math improved, our physical science improved, and our comprehension developed. Applied math was an unrest in space science, and afterward, the utilization of telescopes was another.

Galileo didn’t create the telescope, coincidentally, yet improved them; Newton imagined another sort that was far superior to that, and we’ve run with the thought from that point. Then, at that point, about a hundred years or so back came another insurgency: photography.

We could catch much fainter objects on glass plates splashed with light-delicate synthetics, which uncovered stars in any case imperceptible to us, subtleties in systems, lovely billows of gas, and residue in space. And afterward, in the last 50% of the last hundred years, advanced locators were designed, which were significantly more touchy than film.

We could utilize PCs to straightforwardly break down perceptions, and our insight jumped once more. When these were combined with telescopes sent in circles around the Earth — where our bothering and bubbling climate doesn’t obscure our perceptions — we started one more transformation. Also, where could we currently be?

Astronomy Today

We’ve come such a long way! What inquiries could we at any point regularly pose that our precursors could not have possibly tried, what proclamations were made with a very decent level of sureness? Think about this: The lights in the sky are stars! There are other worlds.

We make searching for life on outsider planets genuinely and burn through billions of dollars getting it done. Our universe is one of a hundred billion others. We can straightforwardly see 4% of the Universe. Stars detonate, and when they do they make the stuff of life: the iron in our blood, the calcium in our bones, and the phosphorus that is the foundation of our DNA.

The most widely recognized sort of star Known to mankind is so weak you can’t see it without a telescope. Our planetary group is filled to spilling over with universes odder than we might have envisioned. Nature has more imagination than we do.

It comes up with some nutty stuff. We’re clever too, we big-brained apes. We’ve gleaned some significant knowledge… yet there’s still far to go. So, with that, I think we’re ready. Let’s explore the universe.

Conclusion With Review

Today you realized what stargazing is, and that space experts aren’t simply individuals who work telescopes, however, incorporate mathematicians, engineers, specialists, developers, and even craftsmen.

We likewise wrapped up with a speedy history of the beginnings and improvement of cosmology, from old eyewitnesses to the Hubble Space Telescope. Brief training is created in relationship with PBS Computerized Studios.

Photos Sources