3 - Doing astronomy

Summary

Origins

Science is a process

Astronomy is the study of the Universe and everything in it. Astronomers use the tools and language of many different disciplines. Sometimes they are physicists, at other times chemists, biologists, or geologists. They follow the systematic scientific process that has developed over the last 400 years to ask questions about nature and to answer them convincingly. Astronomers also design (and sometimes build) telescopes to help collect the data needed to discover answers to the questions they ask.

In many ways, doing science is like putting together a jigsaw puzzle. Scientists start by observing some aspect of the world (or the Universe), then try to fit that piece into the bigger picture. Occasionally the answer to a simple question may be profound, as when Einstein asked himself what the world would look like if he were riding on a beam of light. The answer was the theory of special relativity.

Space is vast

The scale of space can be both confusing and daunting. The Earth seems like a very big place to us, but it is really a very tiny place in the Universe. For example, a jet airliner flying at 500 miles per hour (800 kilometers per hour) would take about 50 hours to fly around the Earth — a distance of about 25 000 miles.