Looking to the Stars: Astronomy
Astronomy is the realm of our scientific study of the
Universe. The very word conjures up in our mind the space, dark galaxies,
heavenly planets, stars, milky ways, constellations and black holes. It is the
science, which tells us how the Universe was born, probably out of a huge
explosion of the inert gases in the outer space (the ‘Big Bang’ theory which we
know of as of now…), how the stars are formed and why the planets shine or how
the sun and the moon get their lights. This science also tells us what is the
distance between earth and the moon, or the sun and the earth, how many planets
and moons (or satellites) are there in the Universe, what are asteroids and
meteorites or how the stellar activities affects the geographical patterns of
the earth and how inter-galactic movements cause catastrophes on the earth or
if a large asteroid moving in a galactic orbit would collide with us!
Looking back at history from ancient to modern times we see
that the greatest of the greats like Euclid, Galileo, Copernicus all had been
the masters of the science of the Universe, which unraveled lot of mysteries of
our Science, primarily physics, which lead to pioneering and path breaking
discoveries of Newton, Einstein and other luminaries in medieval modern times
and thus making human being the most intelligent species on this Universe.
Newton’s discovery of Earth’s attraction to all objects or what we call the
‘gravity’, lead to the evolution of the theories which changed the very
definition of inter galactic movements, planetary orbits, constellation
positions, which subsequently revolutionized the space programs of mankind with
geo-stationery orbits and global positioning satellites and the first manned
expedition to space and then the historic mission to moon.
Astronomy subsequently lead to another area of scientific
study of the Universe with relevance to physics thus making ‘astro-physics’ a
subject by itself. It got its relevance from the fact that if laws of physics
are applicable to terrestrial objects, then it must be applicable to the
stellar objects as we, which are the planets, stars, moons and other moving
particles. Till then material physics was two dimensional, with two vertices- x
(vertical) and y (horizontal), which soon had another component or vertex added
as z(third dimension or space… that’s what we called 3 – dimensional).
Sir, Albert Einstein changed the face of the astro-physics
science and revolutionized with his path breaking ‘Theory of Relativity’ which
talked about another dimension, which is ‘Time’. This actually made physics
looked so simple and applied Newton’s universal “Laws of Motion” on the
planetary bodies, where the fourth dimension was provided by the ‘relativity of
time’ (from his E=MC2), which showed how the relative speed or movement of
planetary objects vary in space- thus leading to the modern day’s technology
development of Space Programs.
So there we are today, in 2009, where we are building
International Space Station and are dreaming of making human colony on the
moon.
