Chapter+2



Most people do not know that if you struck a match on the moon you could see the flare. From the tiniest wobbles of distant stars we can infer their size and character. Not until 1978 no one had noticed that Pluto had a moon. That summer a young astronomer named James Christy made a routine examination in Flagstaff, Arizona of photos and he saw something there. He consulted with Robert Harrington and concluded that what they were looking at was a moon. People wondered why it took so long to find a moon in our own solar system. It is partly a matter of where astronomers point their instruments.
 * Things You Never Knew About Pluto and Moons ** By: Leah

Astronomer Clark Chapman said " Most people think that astronomers get out at night in observatories and scan the skies. That's not true. All most all the telescopes we have in the world are designed to peer at very tiny pieces of the sky way off." Pluto was actually found in 1930 at first. This large event in astronomy held the credit of the astronomer Percival Lowell. Lowell became one of the wealthiest Boston families. He gifted the famous observatory that holds his name. It is remembered for his belief that Mars was covered with canals and built by hard-working Martians for purposes of handing over water from Polar Regions to the lands near the equator.



  Section 2:by Keighley Planet X In 1916, Lowell died after he proposed there was a 9th planet and he named it Planet X. He based his belief on irregularities he detected in the orbits of Uranus and Neptune, and devoted the last years of his life to try and find the gassy giant that he was sure was out there. Unfortunately the search was stopped. Lowell's heirs argued over his estate but in 1929, partly as a way of deflecting attention away from the Mars canal saga, Lowell's Observatory directors decided to resume the search. They also hired a young man from Kansas named Clyde Tombaugh. Although Tombaugh had no formal training as an astronomer, he was still diligent and he was astute, and after a year's patient searching he somehow spotted Pluto (planed x). The observation on which Lowell had predicted the existence of a planet beyond Neptune proved to be true. The new planet was nothing like Lowell had predicted; like a massive gasball, but no one actually knew that it was a distant icy dot. It was the first American discovered planet. It was named Pluto for the first two letters on Lowell's initials. Some astronomers continue to think that there may be a Planet X out there. Maybe even ten times the size of Jupiter, but it would be so far out there that it would be invisible to us. No one is quite sure how big it is, or what it is made of, what kind of atmosphere it has, or even what it really is. Many astronomers believe that it isn't a planet at all, but it might merely be the largest object found in a zone of galactic debris known as the Kuiper belt. An astronomer named F.C. Leonard in 1930, theorized the Kuiper belt, but the name came from a Dutch native working in America who expanded the idea named Gerard Kupier. If Pluto is a planet, then it is a very odd one.

=  = = = = = = Space: The Final Frontier   = = BY: Faith   = = Section 3   = =   = = These are the voyages that our astronauts dream of. Unfortunately they may never live out that dream. At this point we just don't have the technology necessary to travel very far into space. = = The most common thing people think of when they here solar system is our own nine planets. When we think of our solar system we imagine those picture se see in textbooks. Those pictures aren’t drawn to scale. If they were drawn to scale the Earth would be the size of a pea, and Pluto would be a mile and a half away and the size of a bacterium. Our nine planets are so far spaced out that Neptune only receives 3% as much sunlight as Jupiter. = = <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif"><span style="font-size: 99%; font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif">  <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif"><span style="font-size: 99%; font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif">The reality is that even the planets we think of take us only one-fifty-thousandth of the way to the edge of our solar system. At the end of our solar system is the Oort cloud. The middle of the Oort cloud is about 50,000 Astronomical Units (the distance form the earth to the sun) from us. It would take about 10,000 years to reach the Oort cloud. We can’t even look at the Oort cloud, so we don’t even know it is really there. = = <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif"><span style="font-size: 99%; font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif">  <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif"><span style="font-size: 99%; font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif">When we think of all our accomplishments we’ve come a long way. It is going to take a lot more, though, to allow us to reach the edge of our solar system. We can’t even see to the edge of our solar system. So we must wait to boldly go where no man has gone before. = == <span style="font-size: 140%; font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace">  <span style="font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace">

<span style="color: rgb(0, 20, 7)"> <span style="display: block; font-size: 130%; color: rgb(20, 2, 0); font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace; text-align: center">Section 4  <span style="font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace"><span style="font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace">** Stuck in the middle of nowhere; nearest neighbor just so happens to be 4.3 light-years away. **   <span style="font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace"><span style="font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace">** by Raider-Jennifer1 **   <span style="font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace"><span style="font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace">I bet most of you have no idea what or even who is Proxima Centauri is? Well Proxima Centauri just so happens to be our nearest neighbor in the cosmos, which you’ve just read, is a shocking, 4.3 light-years away. (That is 100 million times farther than a single trip to the moon; which would roughly take about 25,000 years to reach.) <span style="font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace"><span style="font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace">Our home, the Milky Way is only 1 of the 140 billion or so other galaxies out there. In 1960, Frank Drake, a professor at Cornell, worked out a renowned equation to calculate the possibility of advanced life in the cosmos based on a series of thinning probabilities. Sadly space is so spacious that the average distance between any two of these civilizations is about to be at least 200 light years, which is well beyond our reach. <span style="font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace"><span style="font-family: 'Courier New',Courier,monospace">In 1985, Carl Sagan, calculated the number of likely planets in the universe, which at large is at 10 billion trillion. Sagon quoted ““If we were randomly inserted into the universe, the chances that you would be on or near a planet would be less than 1 in a billion trillion trillion.” (That’s 1033 which is a good 30 zeros) Isn’t it mind-boggling how immense the Universe actually is? It almost seems like it would be endless/infinite.

The Milky Way is only 1 of the 140 billion or so other galaxies out there.