Astronomy

Astronomy

Description of the main components of the solar system

A planet is an astronomical body with sufficient mass for its self-gravitation that is orbiting around the sun (Slater,2018). There are nine planets that are arranged around the sun; they include Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. The moon is a body that is celestial that make rotations around the planets. Each planet has the moons, as the planet is smaller it tends to have fewer moons. The moon rotates around the planets, and it’s larger than the planets they are rotating. The asteroid belt is the region between Mars and Jupiter, where many asteroids that are in the solar system are rotating around the sun. The Kuiper Belt is an area that is rich in comets in the solar system that is found around the orbit of Neptune and far beyond planet Pluto (Duffett-Smith at el 2017). The Oort cloud is a shell of objects that are like ice; they are found in the outermost part of the solar system..

What are stars and galaxies and their relationship

The stars are made of the gas that is exploding that consists of hydrogen and helium. A light-year is a distance in a vacuum that light travels in a Julian year (Sesana,2016). The nearest star is about 4.37 light-years from the Earth, and it is called Alpha Centauri triple. There are different sizes of stars, the sun is the averaged size star, and there are other stars that are smaller, and others are larger. The size of stars differs spending on the distance they are from the sun. The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy that is made of gas, dust, and stars. The Milky Way galaxy is located at a radius of 27,000 light-years in the inner edge of Orion Arm, and there are about 100 billion stars in the galaxy. The group that contains the galaxy is called the local group. The universe is about 13.77 billion years; this age is approximated through the calculation of the distance plus the radial velocity of other galaxies.

Big numbers I know and how they are written in exponential

The largest population I know is 101 million to give the number the exponential is 101 * 10⁶

(10⁶) is the exponential part. My biggest distance to use is 1377 million miles. Its exponential representation is 1377 * 10⁶. The largest amount of money I have heard being described was trillion dollars in 10¹². Among the largest numbers, I have come across is 923 billion, and its exponential notation is 923* 10⁹ the (10⁹) is the exponential.

Reference

Duffett-Smith, P., & Zwart, J. (2017). Practical Astronomy with your calculator or spreadsheet. Cambridge University Press.

Sesana, A. (2016). Prospects for multi-band gravitational-wave astronomy after GW150914. Physical Review Letters, 116(23), 231102.

Slater, S. (2018). international STudies of Astronomy Education Research Database (iSTAR). RTS Proceedings, 1(1), 341-342.