From the Large-Scale Universe to the Milky Way

The article ‘On the Recentness of What We Know,’ written by Verlyn Klinkenborg, is a pleasant read about the author’s fondness of astronomy and his insight regarding the science of it and knowledge gleaned from it. Klinkenborg recounts a few of his star-gazing memories and then proceeds to analyze the effects cosmological discoveries have on him personally and humanity in general. The author shares bits of theoretical history of the universe and information on the early astronomers whose hypotheses have developed that history. He goes on to reference various well known discoveries throughout the years and marvels at how drastically information in recent years has changed the stories of our universe.

These ideas not only, obviously, created a new conception of the forming of the universe, but also of humanities place within it. The Copernican hypothesis had enormous religious implications as it destroyed the idea that the earth was different from where God was. This eliminated the realm of perfection. Therefore humanity’s place within the Earth was lessening in importance. Also, 1572 a “new star,” which was really an exploding star, left a huge impression on many people. This is because it contradicted the idea that the heavenly spheres were unchanging, thus

The Scientific Revolution is the qualitative jump in sciences in the 17th century. New discoveries in natural science, engineering, geography rejected many traditional ideas and a common picture of the world. Aristotle, Claudius Ptolemy, and Christian Theology represented the universe as geocentric conception where the earth was motionless and in the center of concentric spheres. (479) Such representation was supported till Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) argued Ptolemy's conception and suggested heliocentric understanding. His conception opened the Earth as a planet where the moon took place as Earth's satellite and the sun was the center of planets. Also as Copernicus, Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler disagreed with Ptolemy's geocentric system. Based on the Brahe's work, Kepler came to conclusions that each planet moves in an ellipse and were able to calculate relations between planets' size and

Nicolaus Copernicus was an astronomer who arose the Heliocentric Theory which caused the scientific revolution. Copernicus discoveries were very important, and impacted science to this day. Copernicus constructed his data from his astronomical observations of sun-centered cosmology. The Heliocentric theory is the belief that the sun is in the center of the universe and all the planets revolve around it. The Heliocentric Theory contradicts The Geocentric. “Copernicus's heliocentric solar system named the sun, rather than the earth, as the center of the solar system”. (http://www.biography.com/).

There have been many theories concerning what the universe looks like, how it became this way, and where it is going. The most popular theory that people hold today is that the universe began when all the matter ever present in the universe was contained in a tiny speck and that spec exploded. This is known as the Big Bang. This theory has developed a great deal since it was first conceptualized and continues to evolve today. Many different scientists have had a hand in this.

It was mainly the Copernican theory that caused many to perceive the Scientific Revolution as a war on tradition. As far as understanding the universe was concerned, the medieval world depended on the work of Claudius Ptolemy (c. 90-168), the

In conclusion this unit on astronomy and cosmology helped me understand that there is so much more to the universe than I had initially thought. There is so much more that goes on and our knowledge will only increase as technology makes our ability to learn more about the depths of our

The Universe is something that has been explored for years and years. Over time, our understandings and beliefs on the Universe and our world has changed due to new technologies and discoveries. The Big Bang Theory is one example of an concept that is actively believed within the scientific community and has been made well known in our world today. This theory, which can be used to explain the origin and age of our universe, has been refined over the years through a reviewing process in the scientific community as more discoveries came in due to new technological advancements.

An Era of Change The Copernican Revolution was a time of change, specifically during the Enlightenment Era, as the age in which experimental natural science matured and came into its own. During this time, the rise of new science progressively changed the way Europeans viewed the natural world. This era of new discoveries changed the conception of the universe as well as philosophical inquiry. Although this time was seen somewhat controversial, these increasing discoveries became a success amongst several philosophers in explaining the natural world.

According to R.C. Gupta, dark energy is “mysterious and its puzzling questions, such as why, how, where and when about the dark energy, are intriguing” (Gupta). Dark energy is consider as an mysterious energy that flows in the universe, scientist cannot come up with why dark energy exist, how it is form, where it came from, and when did it form. These question scientist now days are still trying to figure it out. Furthermore, dark matter another mysterious matter that lives in universe and the scientist could not define what they are compose of. The article “Cosmology: Dark matter and dark energy” stated that “dark-matter particles today must move slowly compared with the speed of light — allow the range of possibilities to be pared down.”(Caldwell) Since dark matter is slower than speed light, caused scientist hard to classify the properties of dark matter. However, scientist has not yet give up on doing research on dark matter. According to the same article “Cosmology: Dark matter and dark energy” stated that in the future “Gaia, a satellite mission set to launch in the near future, aims to chart the position and motion of about 109 nearby stars; this map will be used to trace out the gravitational field of the Milky Way, and thereby infer the dark-matter distribution in its dark-matter halo” (Caldwell). This evidence shows that scientist’s future plan on how

The big bang theory is a theory that our universe and everything in it started at one incredibly tiny, minute point that than began to expand in a hot fiery explosion which continued to grow for about 13.7 billion years and is now the cosmos that we know today. In 1927, physicist Georges Lemaître made what could be the greatest discovery in cosmology, he discovered that our universe is expanding. Four years later, he proposed that the universe began with a single quantum, what we now call the big bang.

The study of the universe as a whole is Cosmology. Although easy to label, it is not easy to explain. The foundation of modern cosmology can be described as an arrangement of observations, hypotheses, theories using science, technology, mathematics, physics, and analytics (to name a few) to strive for answers about our beginning, present, and future.

The Copernican Revolution involves the exchange of a “geocentric” worldview to a “heliocentric” view and is inseparably linked to the “scientific revolution” of the seventeenth century movement that represents a renewal of all scientific knowledge of the time. Contrary to popular belief, the “idea that the Earth was round” was written by many ancient Greek texts, and was supported by many philosophers such as Aristotle, Plato, Pythagoras, Archimedes, Eratosthenes and Ptolemy, among others. (Cohen, 30) During the

COSMOLOGY is defined as A Branch of Astrophysics OR as Metaphysical Science which studies the origin, structure, dynamics and evolution of The Universe. What Is Metaphysical? ‘Metaphysical is Something Highly Abstract and/or Overly Theoretical…hard or impossible to observe by own senses.

The Big Bang theory is an effort to explain what happened at the very beginning of our universe. Discoveries in astronomy and physics have shown beyond a reasonable doubt that our universe did in fact have a beginning. Prior to that moment there was nothing; during and after that moment there was something: our universe. The big bang theory is an effort to explain what happened during and after that moment.