Looking for Life

Why Study Astronomy?

Map of the Universe

On a recent weekend trip my husband and I went on a tour of Yerkes Observatory.  We enjoyed the tour and learning about lens and mirror telescopes and all about the famous people who had passed through Yerkes, which included Einstein and Hubble.

In searching for a map of the universe I found that there are 45,000 galaxies as shown by the 2MASS Reshift Survey.

While reading the information I read about a number of different stars and stellar systems like Eta Carinae (image below), Andromeda m31, Abel 2218, Coma Berenices NFC 4881, and Messier 100.  I also read about the Sofia HAWC program.

One of the questions that comes up is why are we studying stars?  They are so far away that it feels that we might never be able to visit.  The answer is inevitably that we want to know if there is life elsewhere in the universe.  If you are interested in physics, chemistry, biology, science then you should be interested in astronomy. Another reason is that we want to know what is going on in the universe to protect us from any activity  that might be going on - asteroids, meteorites and supernovas.

When the Hubble telescope took all of those fabulous pictures is when we were able to turn the invisible into a visible.  But what do all the pretty pictures mean?

Eta Carine

Eta Carinae is way more powerful than our sun, very active and really far away from us, 7,500 light years.  In the image the star is actually in the middle and it is surrounded by two dumbells which are called  Homunculus Nebula. Homunculus is little man in Latin and represents left over bits of stuff after an explosion. Some people think there is a black hole in the middle of each lobe. 

On the tour what I read is that Eta Carinae is going to live a much shorter life than our sun.  So could another earth be located there?  If it will not be there for long as Eta Carinae will be exploding "soon."  Well soon on the universe's time scale -  in a few years, or in our lifetime or maybe in a million years. Well who can predict it anyhow.  Eta Carinae puts out a lot more light than the sun, so if we lived there we would be barbecued with in a nanosecond.

After doing a bit more reading and finding the Space.com website to be quite interesting, it seems that our own Milky Way Galaxy is teeming with life, microscopic life most likely. There is proof for it.

Enceladus, on of the moons of Saturn, is the most likely place to find life in our galaxy. It is located in the E-ring of Saturn and is 1/7 the size of our moon. It has cold liquid water and is geologically active with many chemical compounds such as hydrocarbons, ammonia, propane, ethane and acetylene and plumes of gas that are ejected from the surface.  The chemical composition of the moon is silicate in nature and the surface has craters and canyons.  Many new classes of charged particles and nanograins have been found on Enceladus.  It takes anywhere from 6-3 years to arrive on Enceladus.

Exploring our galaxy is the best first step and a heck of a lot easier than looking billions of light years away.  At least for now.