Supernova Research Shows that the Universe is Expanding
'There is one thing even more vital to science than intelligent methods; and that is, the sincere desire to find out the truth, whatever it may be.'
-Charles Sanders Pierce
When it comes to science, there are many questions and few answers. Finding those few answers is what makes science interesting. One big question is science is whether or not the Universe is expanding. By observing and researching supernovas, one can decide that the Universe is expanding.
The word nova means new star (Ferris 59). Early in times, a sudden increase in brightness in the sky would be considered a new star. "It wasn't until these new stars of 1054, recorded by China, and those of 1572 and 1604, made famous by Tycho Biahe and Johannes Kepler, would now be classified as supernova (North 587). Those two famous astronomers, along with China gave supernova its name.
When supernovas were first seen they were considered to be a part of our own universe. It was because "In 1917, Albert Einstein and other physicists believed our own Galaxy was all there was to the Universe- a uniformly dense collection of stars and other matter floating in the void" (1). Einstein was regarded as one of the most brilliant men of all time. People would surely not disagree with the mighty Einstein! No one would challenge Einstein until 1929. It was then that Edwin Hubble proposed that the universe was much larger than our own galaxy. His evidence was that the galaxy light was redshifted. (1) Redshifting, for example is like "the lowered pitch of a fire truck's siren as it races away, and that the light from more distant galaxies was redshifted farther than closer ones" (1). With Hubble's evidence it was immediately clear that there was more to supernovas than met the eye. With this evidence in mind Einstein called his theory on the Universe, "The biggest blunder of my life."
Knowing that there is more to our Universe than our own galaxy scientists have been able to learn many things about the stars. It was this knowledge that lead scientists to learn that the early stars "were composed of hydrogen, helium and a very small amount of lithium and beryllium and almost nothing else" (6-2) These elements laid the structure for the structure of the stars.
Many of the heavenly bodies were considered to be the representations of deities. The master of reason, Aristotle, stated once long ago that everything was made of only five elements the final being what makes up the heavenly bodies, after all they lacked the proper technologies to know differently. It was Galileo in 1610, using his telescope, that found dark spots on the sun. So as technological innovations occur our understanding of physics and astronomy grow. Newton in 1687 discovered the laws of gravity, suggested that all the solar and stellar bodies operated the same.
In the last hundred years we have made enormous progress in studying not our galaxy but ones billions of light-years away. Only a few hundred years ago our world seemed so big that there were areas of the world that had never been charted and people believed that the Earth was flat (and yes for some reason a few people still believe that today). If we continue to make progress at thus rate the universe will actually begin to seem smaller because of how much more we might know.
The third thing they debated was how bright novae seemed. Shapley said that some novae looked so bright to us, that they would have be amazingly bright to also be so far away. Curtis said that they were so bright that
Barry claims that to be a scientist is more than intelligence and curiosity, but patience, creativity, courage, passion, and self-sufficiency. He does this to prove science is more than information, but a long process to reach answers that have been questioned. Barry also uses juxta position to analyze the difference of certainty and uncertainty in science. He says “It is the courage to accept-indeed, embrace-uncertainty.” This proves that a scientist’s ability to accept what is unknown distinguishes them from a good or bad scientist. Barry uses his juxta position create a clear line between good and bad scientists, certainty and
Cosmology is a field of astronomy that focuses on the framework, and emergence of the universe. Over the years, many cosmologists have contributed to the subject, using many forms of technology, to make a multitude of discoveries. Improvements in technology are responsible for superlative discoveries, chiefly about the Big Bang, the origin of our universe. The works of various cosmologists, such as Galileo Galilei, Edwin Hubble, Robert Dicke, Arno Penzias, Robert Wilson, and Vera Rubin have changed the way humanity views the universe, through their use of technology, and through their brilliance.
Stars explode at the end of their lifetime, sometimes when they explode the stars leave a remnant of gasses and, dust behind. What the gasses come together to form depend on the size of the remnant. If the remnant is less than 1.4 solar masses it will become a white dwarf, a hot dead star that is not bright enough to shine. If the remnant is roughly 1.4 solar masses, it will collapse. “The protons and electrons will be squashed together, and their elementary particles will recombine to form neutrons”. What results from this reaction is called a neut...
. . . the truths whose discovery has cost the most effort, which at first could be grasped only by men capable of profound thought, are soon carried further and proved by methods that are no longer beyond the reach of ordinary intelligence. (Condorcet)
The Big Bang Theory is one of the most important, and most discussed topics in cosmology today. As such, it encompasses several smaller components that attempt to explain what happened in the moments after creation, and how the universe we know today came from such a fiery, chaotic universe in the wake of the Big Bang. One major component of the Big Bang theory is nucleosynthesis. We know that several stellar phenomena (including stellar fusion and various types of super novae) are responsible for the formation of all heavy elements up through Plutonium, however, after the advent of the Big Bang theory, we needed a way to explain what types of matter were created to form the earliest stars.!
Centuries ago, people gazed into the night sky wondering what it was that they were looking at. When astronomers first started to study the night sky, like Galileo, Copernicus and even modern day astronomers, they all shared one goal, and that was to see further than anyone has ever before. The invention of the Hubble Space Telescope changed the study of astronomy forever. Astronomers were seeing and learning more in just days of the launch of the telescope than past astronomers had in their lifetimes. The Hubble Space Telescope is the most technologically advanced telescope to enter space. Its advanced technology has made it possible to obtain countless amounts of data about space and open many doors in the exploration of space. Its accuracy has and still is proving/debunking the myths of space.
Shklovskii, Iosif S. Stars: Their Birth, Life, and Death. Moscow: Central Press for Literature in Physics and Mathematics, 1975.
As you can see we have been temporarily blinded from the truth by fictional things that are easy to believe and that we want to believe. There are so many incorrect theories and ideas and most of them are just plain ridiculous. Astronomy can be a very complicated subject, but it is very necessary to understand what really happens in our galaxy and out in the huge frontier we call space.
The first person to ever observe the Milky Way was Greek philosopher, Democritus, who said the galaxy may consist of distant stars. In 1610, Galileo Galilei used a telescope to study the Milky Way and came to the conclusion that it was composed of billions and billions of faint stars. Then, in 1750, Thomas Wright c...
Generally, science is a hotly discussed and vehemently debated topic. It is difficult to achieve consensus in science, considering the fact that ideas are diverse about even science definition, leave alone the true interpretations and meaning of scientific experiments, philosophies and discoveries. However, these arguments, disagreements as well as continuous trials to find a better reasoning, logic and explanation are exactly what have always been driving science progress from art to art form. It is worth noting that, in Philosophy of Science: A Very Short Introduction, the Author-Samir Okasha explore various way of looking at science via the prism of life by citing a variety of scientific experiments, and providing examples from history of science.
The Universe is a collection of millions of galaxies and extends beyond human imagination. After the big bang, the universe was found to be composed of radiation and subatomic particles. Information following big bang is arguable on how galaxies formed, that is whether small particles merged to form clusters and eventually galaxies or whether the universe systematized as immense clumps of matter that later fragmented into galaxies (Nasa World book, 2013). A galaxy is a massive area of empty space full of dust, gases (mainly 75% Hydrogen and 25%Helium), atoms, about 100-200 billion stars, interstellar clouds and planets, attracted to the center by gravitational force of attraction. Based on recent research, 170 billion galaxies have been estimated to exist, with only tens of thousands been discovered (Deutsch, 2011).
The major strength of science is that it has uncertainty and skepticism. Science never claims to be hundred percent accurate. There is always some degree of ambiguity and probability in science. The Heisenberg’s uncertainty in quantum mechanics is a good example of this. According to the Heisenberg’s uncertainty, we can never be sure of the position of the quantum particles. There is always a degree of fuzziness in nature and a fundamental limit to what we can understand about these particles and their behavior. We can only calculate the probability of the nature of the particle and ho...