you're my forever and always: ASTRONOMY

Sunday, August 15, 2010

ASTRONOMY

Astronomy is a natural science that deals with the study of celestial objects (such as stars, planets, comets, nebulae, star clusters and galaxies) and phenomena that originate outside the Earth's atmosphere (such as the cosmic background radiation). It is concerned with the evolution, physics, chemistry, meteorology, and motion of celestial objects, as well as the formation and development of the universe.

Astronomy is one of the oldest sciences. Prehistoric cultures left behind astronomical artifacts such as the Egyptian monuments and Stonehenge, and early civilizations such as the Babylonians, Greeks, Chinese, and Indians performed methodical observations of the night sky. However, the invention of the telescope was required before astronomy was able to develop into a modern science. Historically, astronomy has included disciplines as diverse as astrometry, celestial navigation, observational astronomy, the making of calendars, and even astrology, but professional astronomy is nowadays often considered to be synonymous with astrophysics.

During the 20th century, astronomy split into two major categories:

physics technology
A B

A. OBSERVATIONAL ASTRONOMY

Focused in acquiring data from observation which analized by the aids of basic principles of physics.

B. THEORETICAL ASTRONOMY

Oriented towards the development computer or analytical models to described astronomical object and phenomena.

Some Contributions of Early Civilization

Babylonians

Beggining of mathematical and scientific astronomy. They discovered the lunar eclipse recorded in repeating cycle known as a "caros".

2. Greeks (3rd B.C.)

Aritarcus- calculated the mass of the earth and measures the distance and the size of the moon and star. He is also the first to proposed a heliocentric model of the solar system.
Hipparchus- invented the first and the earliest known astronomical device such as the astrolabe.

Astrolabe

-Antiktheria mechanism (150 - 80 B.C.)- was an early analog computer designed to calculate of sun, moon, etc.

3. Persian

Azophi- discovered the andromeda galaxy and described in his "book of fixed stars".

4. Egyptians

ALI IBN RIDWAN- first observed the SN (supernova 1006). The brightest apparent magnitude stellar event recorded in the history.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Is Astrology considered as a Science?

Astrology is not considered as a science for it has been repeatedly tested and they found out that it has no mutual relationship between the movement of heavens and human lives. Some of the evidence regarding this matter that Astrology is not a Science has been disregarded by its supporters. But the truth is Astrology is really not a Science even it is sometimes related and gives us the knowledge about the natural world and human affairs. In some instance we fall in believing that Astrology is considered as a science because we can use the scientific method to make our conclusion proven. One example is we are thinking for possible answer, we can have one or more possible answers but at the end of this we found out that one is only correct, in relation with with astrology sometimes prediction of our future is considered to be a conclusion but we can only prove it if it will happen.

In science everything has been proven or based on facts or truth. But in Astrology it is only comes in predicting what will happen. Nobody knows it is correct or not. But sometimes this two are confusing, we study the superstitious belief in science but as we go deeper we learn that superstitious belief is a prediction or has no basis.

Some people blamed astrology because of its prediction in human life but the problem is, sometimes we considered astrology as the basis of our daily life. But at the end of this Astrology is still not considered as a science because it is not proven as the study of facts.

Where does the naming Milky Way for our Galaxy come from?

The name Milky Way refers to the milky patch of sky which rings the Earth. You may have seen it if you live outside of a big city, it looks almost like very tenuous clouds to the naked eye. It was named in prehistory before anyone really knew what it was, so just called the "Milky Way" for its appearance. It wasn't until Gallileo looked at an area of it with his telescope in the 1600s that it was realised that the Milky Way was made up of thousands of individual stars, and it was even later that it was realised that what we are looking at is an edge on view of our own galaxy, one of billions in the universe.

An interesting fact related to this is that the word galaxy actually comes from the Greek word, galactos for milk! The Latin version of Milky Way is Via Lactea, with "Via" meaning "Way" or "Road" and "Lactea" meaning "Milk".

What is QUASAR?

· An astronomical object that appears starlike on a photographic plate but possesses many other characteristics, such as a large redshift, that prove that it is not a star.

· The name quasar is a contraction of the term quasistellar object (QSO), which was originally applied to these objects for their photographic appearance. The objects appear starlike because their angular diameters are less than about 1 second of arc, which is the resolution limit of ground-based optical telescopes imposed by atmospheric effects.

· Quasars were discovered in 1961 when it was noticed that very strong radio emission was coming from a localized direction in the sky that coincided with the position of a starlike object. When the positions of small-angular-diameter radio sources were accurately determined, the coincidence with starlike objects on optical photographs led to the discovery of a new, hitherto-unsuspected class of objects, the quasars.

· The color of quasars is generally much bluer than that of most stars with the exception of white dwarf stars.

· The blueness of quasars as an identifying characteristic led to the discovery that many blue starlike objects have a large redshift and are therefore quasars.

THE REASON WHY SCIENCE BLOOM IN THE RENAISSANCE PERIOD

The Renaissance is a transitional period,in the work of the Renaissance all the great nations of Europe shared.The reason why they discovered lots of invention..

These is the time when in the foreground there came out the humanist striving for knowledge, the interest towards the surroundings and most of all a time of the awakened human personality, of the new versatile man. A time when many new sciences were born – ethnography, history, geography, when the freedom of thinking, of personal choice occurred, when the zeal for beauty, self-knowledge and ambition appeared. Meaning to say the people during the Renaissance period are very much curious and more interested to explore their knowledge in order to build a much better invention than before..

PASCAL'S TRIANGLE

In mathematics, Pascal's triangle is a geometric arrangement of the binomial coefficients in a triangle. It is named after the French mathematician Blaise Pascal in much of the Western world, although other mathematicians studied it centuries before him in India, Persia, China, and Italy.

The rows of Pascal's triangle are conventionally enumerated starting with row 0, and the numbers in each row are usually staggered relative to the numbers in the adjacent rows. A simple construction of the triangle proceeds in the following manner. On row 0, write only the number 1. Then, to construct the elements of following rows, add the number directly above and to the left with the number directly above and to the right to find the new value. If either the number to the right or left is not present, substitute a zero in its place. For example, the first number in the first row is 0 + 1 = 1, whereas the numbers 1 and 3 in the third row are added to produce the number 4 in the fourth row.

What is the importance of studying the history of science

you're my forever and always

jesus saves

Sunday, August 15, 2010

ASTRONOMY

No comments:

Post a Comment

history and philosophy of science