Jocelyn Bell is a British astronomer, who set up 1,000 antennae in Cambridge, UK in the 1960s to make a radio telescope. In 1967, she discovered the first pulsar.
Albert Einstein was a physicist who, in 1915, wrote that time and space are part of the same fabric and that masses like stars curve space and time around them. He is best known for the theory of relativity and his famous formula: E=mc2. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1921 for Physics.
Edwin P. Hubble (1889-1953) was an astronomer for which the famous telescope was named. In the early 1900s, he discovered that there were other galaxies in space besides our own galaxy. He found that space was full of galaxies moving away from each other. We learn from this that the Universe is expanding.
Subrahmayan Chandrasekhar is an astronomer whose work led to the discovery of black holes and neutron stars. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1983 for his work.
Henrietta Swan Leavitt was a Harvard astronomer who, in 1908, discovered how to calculate how far away stars are from the earth. Comparing a star's true brightness to its apparent brightness seen through a telescope.
Robert Wilson along with Arno Penzias were astronomers working for Bell Telephone Labs.
They built an antennae that was picking up a strange hum measuring slightly above absolute zero in temperature. It turned out that they had accidentally picked up the radiation left over from the Big Bang. They shared the Nobel Prize for this discovery.
Discoveries - Space Phenomena
Big Bang Theory
This theory states that the entire universe began as a small, hot, energy point that expanded over billions of years into the universe we see today. This theory is supported by:
1. Cosmic background radiation left over from the big bang.
2. Galaxies are still moving apart.
3. If the big bang occurred the way scientists think it did, they predicted that there would be a certain amount of helium out in space. In 1995 a space shuttle mission measured that level of helium in space.
Black Hole
A black hole is made by the death of a huge star, which creates a hole that has such powerful gravity that nothing can escape it, not even light. Black holes can be detected by the x-rays they send out (emit).
Dark Matter
The darkness around stars is called dark matter. No one knows of what it is made.
Electromagnetic Radiation
Electromagnetic radiation includes all forms of light energy. Energy moves through space in a spectrum called the electromagnetic spectrum. These forms of electromagnetic radiation in the spectrum run from one end to the other, from: gamma rays to x-rays to ultraviolet light to visible light to infrared light to microwave to radio waves at the other end of the spectrum.
Light Years
Light moves at 186,000 miles per second (299,000 km per second). This is how fast light travels in a year. It equals 6 trillion miles (10 trillion km). If an object in space is a million light years away, what we are seeing was how it looked a million years ago.
Sun Spots
Sometimes sunspots appear on the surface of the sun. They are found in areas of cooler, darker gas. How many sunspots we see varies in an 11-year sunspot cycle.
Telescopes
The Hubble Telescope orbits Earth every 97 minutes, 360 miles (575 km) above the Earth’s surface in space. The telescope was placed in orbit to take clearer pictures of objects out in space without having to shoot them through Earth’s atmosphere, which distorts them. The results were amazingly clear views of the Universe, our solar system and even galaxies far away. The Hubble Telescope was launched in 1990 and has been shooting pictures ever since. It has been serviced by Space Shuttles to improve and upgrade pictures at least four times.
James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was designed to do infrared astronomy from space. Launched in 2021, it orbits the sun a million miles (1.5 million kilometers) from Earth. The largest telescope in space, it has higher resolution and more sensitive instruments, that allow us to study “every phase of cosmic history.” We can see objects in space too far away for the Hubble Space Telescope. This allows scientists to study the formation of the earliest starts and galaxies.
Spectrograph
A spectrograph is a machine that attaches to a telescope and shows starlight in a spectrum. Astronomers can look at a star’s light spectrum and tell how far away it is and if it is moving further away over time.
