Astronomy

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Introduction

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Astronomy is the study of outer space.Outer space is the stars, moons, planets, and galaxies surrounding Earth.Most of you already know this, but Earth is the planet we live on.I will cover pretty much everything about space from a true and christian perspective.

Planets

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Planets are composed of many different things.Take our planet Earth for example.Earth is composed of rock.It is called a terrestrial planet .A terrestrial planet is a planet of this composed of a substance that is solid, like rock.A non-terrestrial planet,however, is made of a substance that is not solid, like water. There are 13 planets total in our milky way system, 8 regular planets and 5 dwarf planets. A dwarf planet is a planet that is too small to be an actual planet, so scientists came up with the name "dwarf planet". The 8 regular planets in our solar system are Mercury,Venus,Earth,Mars,Jupiter,Saturn,Uranus,and Neptune. The 5 dwarf planets in our solar system are Ceres,Haumea,MakeMake,Pluto,and Eris. As most of you know,Pluto is not a planet anymore.Most planets have moons. Six of the eight regular planets in our solar system have moons and four of the five dwarf planets have moons.There are estimated to be around one septillion planets in the known universe. Which is 1 with 24 zeros after it!!

Moons

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A moon is a celestial body that surrounds a planet. Our planet, Earth has only one moon, whereas Jupiter, on the other hand, has around 64 known moons! There are around 240 known moons in the milky way.Moons,just like planets, are composed of different materials too.some are composed of rock and cooled lava, like our moon. Others are composed of water and ice.Most moons and planets are named after Roman and Greek gods in mythology. Some moons are peaceful, like our moon, whereas others, such as one of Jupiter's moons, Io are very lively. The reason why Io, the smallest moon of Jupiter, has so much volcanic activity is because of Jupiter and all the other larger moons both pulling on it at the same time. This causes an enormous amount of friction to build up inside the core of Io.

Stars

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There are many different types of stars with various temperatures and colors. One star, Our Sun, is a yellow colored medium class star, with an average temperature of about 5500 degrees Kelvin. Kelvin is a special scale scientists use.The reason it is so special is because it does not have a negative side to it. The lowest possible temperature on the kelvin scale is 0, which is absolute zero. Absolute zero is the theoretical temperature at which all molecular activity ceases. There are five different kinds of stars, dwarf stars, regular stars, like our sun,giants, super giants, and hyper giants.

Galaxies

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Galaxies are large groups of stars in the universe. There are large galaxies and small galaxies. Our galaxy, the milky way, is a medium sized galaxy ranging about 120,00 light years across. A light year is the distance in which light travels in one year.

So that would mean that if you were able to travel and the speed of light,180,000 miles per second, it would take you 120,00 years to get from one end of the milky way to the other. The universe is very large and there are many objects much larger than this.