Keep Smiling...............: Astronomy with A Visual Perspective

Astronomy has always been a pet and revered subject, the night sky always fascinated….. If Vipassana was a fascinating journey inward, astronomy was, actually is, an equally fascinating journey outward……. pun intended :)

Just look at some of these concepts; it’s total science, yet, don’t they just bring out that sense of real awe and mystery ?

Spacial distances: The distances in space are so vast that light takes a long time to travel from each of those stars. And we’re talking 3,00,000 kilometers per second. Yet, its counted in light years, right? What does it imply?

When we look up at the sky what we see is actually not the present….it’s the past. For instance, say Sirius, the brightest star in our sky ( It’s one star that’s visible even through the haze and smog of a city night sky ). It takes light seven years to reach us from Sirius. So when we see Sirius today, we’re actually seeing Sirius as it was seven years back. Our nearest star, Proxima Centauri is 4.3 light years away, and that’s our nearest. Earth is 28,000 light years away from the center of milky way, our own galaxy. Stars from other galaxies are millions of light years away. So next time you look up at the sky, remember you aren’t just looking far into space, you’re actually looking into different time spans as well.

Black holes: Black holes are strangely the most dense of matter and nothing like the hole that they’re called. Like everything has a birth and death, so also stars are born and die, it just happens over millions and millions of years. When a star dies, it collapses on itself and all that matter gets into a small space of very high density. The density is so high and creates such a strong gravitational field, that not even light can escape it. It exists as a very powerful object in space, but it’s very small and completely invisible.

Here’s a five minute journey which will give you a visual perspective of size and distance in space, and trust me, through all our exposure through text books and encyclopedia, you’ll still be amazed. Thanks to my dad for having shared these slides, I enjoyed them !