Astronomy Facts and Pictures
Learning about astronomy and physics is a hobby of mine. This page is simply a place where I collect information on astronomy and physics. I put it here so that visitors to my website, such as students, might become interested.
This is a great website for current news in astronomy and physics: https://www.universetoday.com/.
Recent exciting update in physics:
Physicists have something they call the standard model. For decades the standard model has nearly perfectly described the actions of all known particles and forces (please correct me if you are a physicist). But, it turns out that having a model that accurately predicts everything is actually somewhat boring. Recently, researchers discovered that a certain particle, the muon, does not behave exactly as the standard model predicts. So, what does this mean for physics? Everyone gets excited and goes back to the drawing board. Perhaps the answers will reveal something about dark matter or even dark energy. Here is a video from a group, Sixty Symbols, that makes great physics videos.
This is Europa, an icy moon of Jupiter slightly smaller than our moon. The yellow colored areas are thought to be regular table salt. Astronomers believe there is vast salty ocean of liquid water underneath the icy crust. Enormous geysers spew salt water into space and some of the water and salt return to the surface forming the yellow patches. The water also contains amino acids, which are important for life. For there to be a liquid ocean, there must be a heat source, which might also feed some form of life. We find organisms living without sunlight by thermal vents on Earth's ocean floors and we might also find life forms in Europa's oceans if we can figure out a way to get there and look.
Europa in the context of Jupiter.
Notice the tiny spacecraft in the lower left. Saturn's rings are replenished by the geysers erupting on its moons.
Saturn
From the Hubble Deep Field, the oldest galaxies we've seen. This is what happens when NASA let's the Hubble stare at a blank patch of the Universe for many days . This image allowed astronomers to study star formation in a region 5 to 10 billion light-years away from us. The universe is only 13-14 billion years old so these could be some of the earliest solar systems.