Monthly Archives: June 2012
Birth of our Solar System
Our solar system is estimated to have been born a little after 9 billion years after the Big Bang, making it about 4.6 billion years old. According to current estimates, the sun is one of more than 100 billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy alone, and orbits roughly 25,000 light-years from the galactic core.
Many scientists think the sun and the rest of our solar system was formed from a giant, rotating cloud of gas and dust known as the solar nebula. As gravity caused the nebula to collapse, it spun faster and flattened into a disk. During this phase, most of the material was pulled toward the center to form the sun.
Below is an infographic explaining the solar system from the inside out!
Source SPACE.com: All about our solar system, outer space and exploration
How it all started
The big bang theory, a graphic timeline of the universe!
“Hubble Ultra Deep Field” of Galaxies!
This view of nearly 10,000 galaxies is called the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. The snapshot includes galaxies of various ages, sizes, shapes, and colors. The smallest, reddest galaxies, about 100, may be among the most distant known, existing when the universe was just 800 million years old. The nearest galaxies–the larger, brighter, well-defined spirals and ellipticals–thrived about 1 billion years ago, when the cosmos was 13 billion years old.
The microwave sky as seen by ESA’s Planck satellite. Light from the main disk of the Milky Way is seen across the center band, while radiation left over from the Big Bang is visible on the outskirts of the image.
Happy Summer!!!
Happy Summer! Around 7pm EST the earth will tilt on its axis at an angle closest facing the sun! Perfect heat wave to welcome the summer of 2012.
The summer solstice occurs exactly when the axial tilt of a planet’s semi-axis in a given hemisphere is most inclined towards the star that it orbits. Earth’s maximum axial tilt to our star, the Sun, during a solstice is 23° 26′. This happens twice each year, at which times the Sun reaches its highest position in the sky as seen from the North or South Pole respectively.
NASA- SDO Venus Transit
Check out the links below to watch a time lapsed video of the transit:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z9rM8ChTjY&feature=youtube_gdata_player
Partial Lunar Eclipse
Partial Lunar Eclipse begins about now! If the weather is clear you can see the earth block the sun up to about a 1/3 of its surface! Tomorrow is the Venus transit. Enjoy!!!
Venus Transit
How cool! Lots of Astronomical excitement happening!
The next transit of Venus will occur on 5 and 6 June 2012, and will be the last Venus transit this century; the prior transit took place on 8 June 2004. After 2012, the next transits of Venus will be in December 2117 and December 2125.
Venus transits are historically of great scientific importance as they were used to gain the first realistic estimates of the size of the Solar System. Observations of the 1639 transit, combined with the principle of parallax, provided an estimate of the distance between the Sun and the Earth that was more accurate than any other up to that time. In addition, the June 2012 transit will provide scientists with a number of other research opportunities, particularly the refinement of techniques to be used in the search for exoplanets.
CinDeepThoughts 