Star Goes Black After Rare Celestial Event

Tuesday, May 22nd, 2012

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/340914/title/Evening_star_goes_black_in_rare_celestial_event

This article talks about a rare event that will happen on June 5^th of this year. It will be the last chance for astronomers to see the passing of Venus between the Earth and the Sun. The planet will take six hours to march across the star’s face, and will appear as an inky black dot against the solar disk. The outline of Venus will disappear until 2117, because the planet’s orbit is slightly off, and this causes its solar transit to come in pairs spaced eight years apart with more than 100 years between pairs. During the most recent transit pair, the scientists tried to focus on timing when Venus entered and exited the Sun’s disks, in order to calculate the Sun’s size. On 2004, it was revealed that large portions of Venusian atmosphere could be seen in Earth during the transit. Scientists are hoping to not only study Venus itself during transit, but also, with the same method, observe far off exo-planets that are not seen when passing between their star and Earth.

I found this article interesting, because astronomy is a very interesting subject that has always been developing. 100 years ago no astronomer could have anticipated this transit question, or how to measure the size of the Sun by using the transit of Venus around it. The fact that we can see planets, or even determine the size of a planet because another is orbiting around it, is very impressive and is new technology, a hundred or two hundred years ago, no one would have imagined this to be possible, and because of the technology we have today we can actually evaluate this rare events. I think that it interested me because of the title, I saw the title and I opened it to read it because I found it interesting.

I don’t know if I can relate this to my life, I think that up to some level I can, because I’m really interested in astronomy, and I have always found Space very interesting and I think that studying it is very interesting. I think that the only way I can relate it to my life is the fact that I like astronomy, because it doesn’t affect my life to any level, its just something that I’ve always been interested in. The area of interaction that I can relate this to is to Human Ingenuity, because scientists that work with space and space technology have changed the way we think and the way that we see things from outer space. They have basically changed the way that we perceive things and this is very important, because we can see how new technology has changed the way that we actually see things. 

A Star Is Torn

A Star is Torn

Wednesday, May 2nd, 2012

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/340380/title/A_star_is_torn

This article talks to us about one of the wonders of space, how a black hole swallows a star. In 2010 NASA spotted a brightening around a massive back hole found in more than 2 billion light years from Earth. The flare continued to grow in brightness but then it died out. On May 2, an online article came out explaining how black holes engulf stars, and it said that by the time of the of engulfment, the star is just a helium-rich core, that probably had lost all of its layers in previous encounters with the black hole. The black hole ingests the star but leaves some stellar material into space. In 2010 this is most likely what happened, scientists suggest, that the light shown was the evidence that the black hole was shredding a star that wandered too close to it. Such disruptions are said to be rare, occurring only once every 10,000 years per galaxy, and it can also be helpful for astronomers to spot hidden black holes.

I chose this article, because at first I had seen a short notice on a National Newspaper that same morning, and I thought it was interesting, then when I was going to do the blog I saw it, and I decided I was going to use it. The way I chose it and how it is related to my life are closely related, because I’m very interested in the way the things of outer space work, and black holes are just something that are not really common, and the fact that they can eat up stars is just beyond the common thing you hear about space. I think that everything about this article interested me, and I hadn’t done an article related to space since a while ago, and I think that it is just something that is always going to be a part of me, and it was just a very interesting article.

I think that the area of interaction to which I can relate this article is Environments, because outer space is just another environment that we know little of. So I think that it is closely related to the way we can perceive our own environment.