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    Beyond the Stars: Discoveries in Astrophysics
    Beyond the Stars: Discoveries in Astrophysics
    Beyond the Stars: Discoveries in Astrophysics
    Ebook60 pages34 minutes

    Beyond the Stars: Discoveries in Astrophysics

    By Rowan Everhart

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    About this ebook

    Embark on a journey through the vast cosmos as astrophysicist Rowan Everhart unveils the enigmatic realm of quasars and black holes in "Beyond the Stars: Discoveries in Astrophysics." Delve into the depths of space, where quasars reign as cosmic powerhouses, emitting intense radiation from the distant corners of the universe. Everhart explores t

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRWG Publishing
    Release dateMay 16, 2024
    ISBN9798869381712
    Beyond the Stars: Discoveries in Astrophysics

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      Book preview

      Beyond the Stars - Rowan Everhart

      2

      The Birth of Astrophysics

      However, Galileo was certainly not the first to make use of the telescope for astronomical observations. It wasn't long before other celestial objects were discovered, such as the four largest moons of Jupiter (which are therefore known as the Galilean satellites). These satellites provided vital observational support for the idea that the Earth circles the Sun, as proposed by Copernicus, rather than all other celestial bodies circling the Earth, as claimed by the approved cosmology of the Catholic Church and by its chief philosophical defender, Aristotle.

      The birth of astrophysics is inextricably linked with the invention of the telescope by Galileo in 1609. This allowed observations of the heavens to be recorded with better spatial resolution - and, crucially, to be repeated and improved - than the naked eye could ever manage. His most famous observations of the heavens are also those whose consequences for the history of ideas had the most far-reaching impact: the discovery of the satellites of Jupiter and the phases of Venus. These demonstrated that celestial bodies orbit, or are orbited by, something other than the Earth.

      3

      The Expanding Universe

      In 1927, the Belgian astronomer-physicist Georges Lemaître visited Lemaitre's idea was that the universe began with a hot explosion, now known as The Big Bang, proposed by his colleague and friend Hermann. Lemaitre's most significant contribution to the expanding universe came when Hubble discovered that the universe was not only expanding but also getting larger with time. That implies that if we look to distant galaxies, they are flying away from us at higher speeds as he observed. Hubble's results were described in the now famous Hubble's Law, and Lemitre's theoretical work on what we now call the expansion of the universe was based on the solutions of Einstein equations proposed previously by Friedmann but went unnoticed.

      The discovery that the universe is expanding came as a great surprise. For a long time, it was thought that the universe was not changing with time. In 1917, Albert Einstein added a term to his famous equations for gravity. Without his cosmological constant, the equations predicted that the universe should either expand or collapse. To keep the universe static, under the pressure of his contemporaries who believed that it was unchanging, Einstein had to introduce this arbitrary constant. Just two years later, Russian astrophysicist Aleksandr Fridman showed that the Einstein equations actually predicted a universe that would expand. However, his work remained almost unnoticed till decades

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