The Universe Ursa Major Dubhe

M81 Galaxy
Hydra Centaurus
The universe is much larger than the human mind can truly comprehend. The mind The third largest constellation of the 88 in our night Hydra is a truly enormous constellation
starts to boggle even at the distances to our neighboring stars. Astronomers place the sky, Ursa Major (Great Bear) is only visible in the representing a mythical sea serpent. It
distances of some protogalaxies at over ten billion light-years from Earth, which indi- northern hemisphere. It is most famous for the Radio Lobe
snakes its way across 100 degrees of sky,
cates that the visible universe is at least twice that in its expanse. When we look deep asterism (a recognizable pattern of stars, not a con- from Cancer in the west to Libra in the
into space we also look deep into the past, witnessing the aftermath of the Big Bang stellation in itself) formed by its seven brightest stars. east. But despite its size, Hydra is often dif- Active Galactic Nucleus
that gave birth to the universe. ficult to trace because of the relative faint-
The Big Dipper has long been a useful guide to terres- ness of the stars. Dust Lane
A light-year is the distance light travels in one year, or about 5.87 trillion miles. It is the trial navigation, because a line drawn from Merak past
favored unit of measure for large astronomical distances. Many astronomers perfer to Dubhe points almost directly to the pole star Polaris.
use a unit called a parsec which is equivalent to 3.26 light-years. The name is a con- Inner Barred Spiral Disk
traction of “parallax of one arc second.”
Merak

The Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of planet Earth taken in 1990 by Voyager 1 from a M81 is one of the most striking examples
Hydra is home to the binocular Centaurus A is a lenticular galaxy about 11 million light-years away in the constellation Centaurus. It is
record distance, showing it against the vastness of space.The idea for taking the distant of a grand design spiral galaxy, with near
object M83, a face-on barred spiral one of the closest radio galaxies to Earth, so its active galactic nucleus has been extensively researched.
photo and the title came from scientist and astronomer Carl Sagan. Voyager 1 was perfect arms spiraling into the very center.
launched on September 5, 1977. Sagan had pushed for Voyager to take a photo of the Because of its proximity to Earth, its large galaxy known as the Southern Pin-
Earth when its vantage point reached the edge of the solar system. On February 14, size, and its active galactic nucleus (which wheel. It lies 15 million light-years
1990, having completed its primary mission, NASA commanded the spacecraft to turn harbors a 70 million solar mass supermas- from Earth and is 30,000 light-years
around to photograph the planets of the Solar System. The image Voyager returned of siveblack hole) Messier 81 is a popular across. M83 is known for its unusu-
Earth was of a "pale blue dot" in the shadow galaxy to study in professional astronomy. ally high incidence of supernovae The Boomerang Nebula is a protoplanetary nebula
of a sunbeam. (explosions from dying stars). located 5,000 light-years away from Earth, also in
Centaurus. The nebula is measured at -272°C, the
Sagan gives the distance as 3.7 billion miles coldest naturally occuring place in the known uni-
from Earth. verse. It is only one Kelvin warmer than absolute
zero (the lowest limit for all temperatures.)

“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s

home. That’s us. On it everyone you love,
everyone you know, everyone you’ve ever
heard of, every human being who ever was,
lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy
earth and suffering, thousands of confident religions,

M ilky Way
ideologies, and economic doctrines,
every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and de-
stroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, 40 0
00
every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every Distance from core
teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, (in light-years)
30
00
every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history 0 Our own galaxy, the Milky Way, is a disk-shaped island of 200 billion
of our species lived there -- on a mote of dust Crux-Scutum Arm stars measuring at least 100,000 light-years in diameter. The Solar
suspended in a sunbeam. 20 0
00 System lies in the central lower portion of this disk, about
Centaurus 25,000 light-years from the center.
Our planet is a lonely speck in a Sagittarius Arm
10 0
great enveloping cosmic dark.” 00
If we could somehow project ourselves above the Galactic
-Carl Sagan plane and look down the Milky Way would look something
like the image to the left. A bulge of stars 15,000 light-years
thick dominates the center, tapering to a disk of stars about
one-fifth that depth at the edges.

Molecular Ring
The stars are not distributed evenly. The spiral arms, rich in
interstellar gas and dust, are stellar birthplaces, so these tend to
Our Solar System be populated with young blue stars. The bulge is older, giving it a
yellow-orange hue characteristic of evolved stars.
Milky Way
Perseus Arm

The Sun 12,000

Corona

1,200,000˚C
10,000

The sun, as with any star, is a glowing ball of plasma--a gaseous state of matter
Spicule
in which atoms have been ionized and stripped of some or all of their elec-
trons. There is no solid surface. The light and heat we take for granted are
Ursa Major generated in the Sun’s core, where hydrogen is converted into helium via a
8,000
chain of thermonuclear reactions.

Chromosphere
This not only makes the sun shine, but also generates a tremendous outward
pressure that exactly compensates the inward pull of the Sun’s gravity, holding 6,000
the star in balance at a fairly constant radius. This state is known as hydro-
static equilibrium, and stars spend most of their lives in this state.
800,000˚C

4,000

Hydra
6,700˚C

2,000

This representative map of the universe shows the
distribution of material out to the distance of one
billion light-years from the Milky Way galaxy. Yet still
it is only one-fourteenth of the visible universe.
The sun’s interior is a giant nuclear reactor gathering the energy needed to support the star against the crushing pull of gravity. Proton-proton
reactions in the core generate a huge amount of energy in the form of gamma rays and neutrinos. The elusive neutrinos escape readily, but Photosphere
the Sun’s interior is so dense that the gamma rays cannot easily escape into space. Instead, they collide with ions in the dense gases of the
5,500˚C
interior, which absorb them and re-emit them in random directions.
Distance from Surface (km) Temperature