With this information the significance in the constellation’s location can be shown. Orion has a declination of 5°, meaning it is visible to people from both the northern and southern hemispheres. With this known it is understandable why it is one of the most recognised patterns in the sky, although it does appear differently oriented depending on where the observers are located.
History:
The constellation Orion is named after a giant huntsman in Greek Mythology. The arrangement of the stars somewhat resemble a hunter holding a shield or lion. To the east and south are his hunting dogs Canis Major and Canis Minor with whom he fought the bull Taurus.
There are several star stories from many cultures written of Orion. One of the more common
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It has an Apparent Magnitude of 2.09 and an Absolute Magnitude of around -6.1, which is still several thousand times brighter than our sun. The name Saiph also comes from an Arabic phrase: “saif al jabbar” meaning the “sword of the giant” because of its location.
Another Astronomical feature of Orion is the binary stars. Binary Stars comprise two or more stars orbiting around a common centre of mass. These binary stars are located in what is known as The Trapezium Cluster, a tight collection of stars located near the centre of the Great Orion Nebula.
The Orion Molecular Cloud Complex
The Orion Molecular Cloud Complex (The Orion Complex, for short) is a huge collection of nebula located through the Orion Constellation, all grouped tightly together. It is a common place for new stars, born from huge collections of gas clumping together, and containing enough energy to ignite and form a star. Some of its more famous nebulae include: The Great Orion Nebula, The Horsehead Nebula, Bernard’s Loop and the Flame Nebula. These nebulae are also included in the NGC (New General Catalogue) containing 7840 deep space
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It was found much later than the other nebulae because of its tight positioning in with other nebulae.
Category:
The Horsehead Nebula is a very different type of nebula than the prevous two examples and is known as a Dark Nebula. A Dark Nebula has a large amount of gas and dust in one area, so much so that it is able to block out the light from stars sitting behind it. This is why the nebula appears as a sillhoette against the surround Emission Nebula.
Science:
A Dark Nebula is huge collection of gas molecules that block out all the light from stars behind it. Because Dark Nebulae are very thick and large, the temperature at the cloud’s centre can drop to as low as -266.15°C.
With Dark Nebulae containing large amounts of gas and dust, they provide perfect conditions for stars to form. As the clumps of gas become more dense they begin to pull in surrounding objects with their own gravity. This ball, containing merely dust and gas, continues to condense, causing heat to build in its centre. Now it begins a long process of growing in size and energy until the core temperature is strong enough to form a star. From this point it can take up to 100,000,000 years for it to reach its required energy and be classified as a star, after which it will only lasts a few million years. This star formation sequence can occur in all
Clusters like NGC 6530 were formed from the same cloud, and as a result have roughly the same age. This makes them of particular interest to astronomers. Because clusters are all formed from the same material, have roughly the same age, and distance from earth, variations in their brightness is only due to their mass ("Open Star Clusters"). This makes them particularly useful for studying stellar evolution. This cluster was first observed by Hodierna in 1654, and later found independently by Flamsteed in 1680 when he discovered the cluster was located within the Lagoon Nebula. Like most open star clusters, NGC 6530 is relatively young; having been formed less than 6 million years ago ("Young Stars Paint Spectacular Stellar Landscape"). It is known to consist of more than a hundred known bright stars, the light of which show very little reddening as a result of interstellar matter from the nebula, this is likely because the cluster is located just in front of the
Perseus, or “the hero,” has twenty-eight stars. The brightest, most recognizable ones are Mirfak and Algol. Mirfak is the brightest star of Perseus. It is a little bit brighter than Polaris, the North Star. Algol is the most famous star. In the constellation, Algol is the eye of Medusa, translating to “demon star.” People used to think that Algol was cursed due to its constant change in brightness, but we know today that sometimes another star overlaps Algol, causing its magnitude to appear to change. Perseus has six stars with confirmed planets. (Coder pp. 85 & 87, Fanshawe, Perseus Constellation, Perseus Hero)
Hadar, also known as Beta Centauri, is the 10th brightest stars (11th as viewed from Earth). Hadar is a blue-white super giant in the constellation Centaurus (Cen). In about 4,000 years, the motion of Alpha Centauri, who’s proper name is Rigel Kentaurus, will carry it close enough to Hadar that they will appear to be a magnificent double star. Because of the distance away from Earth that Alpha and Beta Centauri are (approximately 90 parsecs), they will be an optical double. As they sit today, the two stars look like a pair of eyes, the right one being Hadar and the left being Rigel Kentaurus. These two stars are considered pointer stars. A “pointer star” is a star that points towards the Southern Cross. Some of the Australian aboriginals call this pair “The two men that once were lions”. Other aboriginals consider them to be the twins that created the world.” Hadar is a proper name of unknown meaning, and has been paired with the name "Wezen," the two applied to the two bright stars in Centaurus as well as to stars in Columba, "Wezen” now commonly used for Delta Canis Majoris. Hadar, less often known as Agena (from the "knee" of the Centaur), is quite the magnificent star.
It’s a white giant and has a temperature of 7700 Kelvin. It’s a type A star that is 8.5 times brighter than the sun. It is most likely to be in the last stage of ordinary star-type life. Scientists are saying the sun’s older twin is found in the middle of Capricorn. Studying this star will help them see how the Earth’s sun will develop.
The Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) website features many spectacular images of the Universe and the phenomena contained within it. Among this considerable collection of pictures there are several diverse photographs of nebulae; such as, The Great Carina Nebula, The Red Spider Planetary Nebula, The Ring Nebula, The Horsehead Nebula, The Crab Nebula and The Butterfly Nebula. The word, nebula, itself comes from the Greek word for cloud, and is defined as a stellar nursery made of clouds of dust and hydrogen gas.
While studying the solar system in our eighth grade science class, we were each assigned a constellation to research. The constellation that was assigned to me was Cepheus. In this paper my goal is to explain the myth behind this constellation and describe its features.
Nebula away so that it can avoid certain things. In the short story, “The Star,” the priest stated,
The Orion Nebula contains one of the brightest star clusters in the night sky. With a magnitude of 4, this nebula is easily visible from the Northern Hemisphere during the winter months. It is surprising, therefore, that this region was not documented until 1610 by a French lawyer named Nicholas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc. On March 4, 1769, Charles Messier inducted the Orion Nebula, M42, into his list of stellar objects. Then, in 1771, Messier released his list of objects for its first publication in Memoires de l’Academie.1
Solar nebula is a rotating flattened disk of gas and dust in which the outer part of the disk became planets while the center bulge part became the sun. Its inner part is hot, which is heated by a young sun and due to the impact of the gas falling on the disk during its collapse. However, the outer part is cold and far below the freezing point of water. In the solar nebula, the process of condensation occurs after enough cooling of solar nebula and results in the formation into a disk. Condensation is a process of cooling the gas and its molecules stick together to form liquid or solid particles. Therefore, condensation is the change from gas to liquid. In this process, the gas must cool below a critical temperature. Accretion is the process in which the tiny condensed particles from the nebula begin to stick together to form bigger pieces. Solar nebular theory explains the formation of the solar system. In the solar nebula, tiny grains stuck together and created bigger grains that grew into clumps, possibly held together by electrical forces similar to those that make lint stick to your clothes. Subsequent collisions, if not too violent, allowed these smaller particles to grow into objects ranging in size from millimeters to kilometers. These larger objects are called planetesimals. As planetesimals moved within the disk and collide with one another, planets formed. Because astronomers have no direct way to observe how the Solar System formed, they rely heavily on computer simulations to study that remote time. Computer simulations try to solve Newton’s laws of motion for the complex mix of dust and gas that we believe made up the solar nebula. Merging of the planetesimals increased their mass and thus their gravitational attraction. That, in turn, helped them grow even more massive by drawing planetesimals into clumps or rings around the sun. The process of planets building undergoes consumption of most of the planetesimals. Some survived planetesimals form small moons, asteroids, and comets. The leftover Rocky planetesimals that remained between Jupiter and Mars were stirred by Jupiter’s gravitational force. Therefore, these Rocky planetesimals are unable to assemble into a planet. These planetesimals are known as asteroids. Formation of solar system is explained by solar nebular theory. A rotating flat disk with center bulge is the solar nebula. The outer part of the disk becomes planets and the center bulge becomes the sun.
Altair (Alpha Aquilae) is the brightest star in Aquila and the 12th brightest star in the sky. Its name is derived from the Arabic phrase an-nasr at-ta’ir, meaning “the flying eagle.” Altair is the southern star of the Summer Triangle asterism, which also consists of the star Deneb, from the constellation Cygnus, as the northeastern vertex of the triangle and the star Vega, in Lyra (the harp), as the northwestern vertex. Altair is a white star roughly seventeen light years from Earth (“Aquila, the Eagle”). Despite being the seventh brightest star in Aquila, Alshain was chosen to be Beta Aquilae by Johann Bayer, a celestial cartographer, and derives its name from the Perso-Arabic word aš-šāhīn, meaning “the falcon.” The second brightest star in Aquila is Tarazed (Gamma Aquilae) whose name originates from the Persian phrase šāhin tarāzu, meaning “the balance” or “beam of the scale.” The stars Epsilon Aquilae and Zeta Aquilae encompass the tail of Aquila. Together, these stars are called Deneb el Okab, which means “the tail of the eagle” in Arabic. In order to d...
A star begins as nothing more than a very light distribution of interstellar gases and dust particles over a distance of a few dozen lightyears. Although there is extremely low pressure existing between stars, this distribution of gas exists instead of a true vacuum. If the density of gas becomes larger than .1 particles per cubic centimeter, the interstellar gas grows unstable. Any small deviation in density, and because it is impossible to have a perfectly even distribution in these clouds this is something that will naturally occur, and the area begins to contract. This happens because between about .1 and 1 particles per cubic centimeter, pressure gains an inverse relationship with density. This causes internal pressure to decrease with increasing density, which because of the higher external pressure, causes the density to continue to increase. This causes the gas in the interstellar medium to spontaneously collect into denser clouds. The denser clouds will contain molecular hydrogen (H2) and interstellar dust particles including carbon compounds, silicates, and small impure ice crystals. Also, within these clouds, there are 2 types of zones. There are H I zones, which contain neutral hydrogen and often have a temperature around 100 Kelvin (K), and there are H II zones, which contain ionized hydrogen and have a temperature around 10,000 K. The ionized hydrogen absorbs ultraviolet light from it’s environment and retransmits it as visible and infrared light. These clouds, visible to the human eye, have been named nebulae. The density in these nebulae is usually about 10 atoms per cubic centimeter. In brighter nebulae, there exists densities of up to several thousand atoms per cubic centimete...
If the nebula is dense enough, certain regions of it will begin to gravitationally collapse after being disturbed. As it collapses the particles begin to move more rapidly, which on a molecular level is actually heat, and photons are emitted that drive off the remaining dust and gas. Once the cloud has collapsed enough to cause the core temperature to reach ten-million degrees Celsius, nuclear fusion starts in its core and this ball of gas and dust is now a star. It begins its life as a main sequence star and little does it know its entire life has already been predetermined.
This group of stars is symbolic in the many cultures. In the Mongolia culture, they are called the Seven gods . In Taoism, the Big Dipper is extremely important and many myths and legends have been derived from this group of stars. If one has read Jin Yong’s Condor Heroes, the QuanZhen Sect has a special sets of martial arts where seven taoists form the shape of the Big dipper and fight using this formation. It’s called the 北斗七星阵 which is the Seven Stars of the Big Dipper Formation.
Astronomers use the celestial sphere to locate the constellations in the sky. The celestial sphere is an imaginary circle around Earth, that helps us be able to see stars. Every star has its place on the celestial sphere, the locations that it is in is seen farther than the actual location of the stars. The stargazers are able to see stars and locate them using the celestial sphere. The celestial Globe helps you be able to locate the objects in the sky. So astronomers just use the sky maps, to locate the constellations in the sky. With the celestial spheres, you can find any of the constellations in the sky that are in our range. Most stargazers think that they would not be able to tell the stars apart from each, but that is not true. Once you start to stargaze than you will be able to tell the difference between each star. You would be able to tell the difference between all of the 88 constellations that are officially recognized by the International Astronomical Union. All 88 constellations have their own Latin names and the names of the popular unofficial stars patterns are known. Different religion has a different name for the constellations in the zodiac. But scientist today uses the historical name for the
The idea behind the Solar Nebular Hypothesis is that the solar system was condensed from an enormous cloud of hydrogen, helium, and a few other elements and rocks. Around five billion years this cloud of materials began to spin and contract together into a disk shape under their own gravitational forces. The particles started combined together, protoplanets, to eventually form planets. A great mass of the material eventually began to form together, protosun, and make up the sun.