Astronomy

I went with Stefano, Keaw, and Leila to an observatory and learned about stars and the universe. It was fantastic. I kind of wish that I was studying astronomy so I could be really well versed in what is known about the "unknown" ya know? One nugget that I didn't know was that 30% of everything is matter; the other 70% is some invisible force or unknown. Of the matter, only 10% is visible. The other 90% is called dark matter. The theory goes that because there is so much dark matter, the light matter is constrained by it. Therefore the light matter follows the paths in the dark matter I believe. Anyway, I thought that was cool because to me that means (I'm not sure if this is correct) that whenever you look at something, you only "see" 10% of it. So when you look at a person, you only see 10% of that person! That's so crazy!

We also saw the largest computer simulation of dark matter that has been done to date. It was done by some computers in Germany and it goes millions and millions of light years out. Of course it is all theoretical and it doesn't match up, but it still makes you feel like you are so small in the grand scheme of things.

We also saw how they can determine the elements in stars by the light they emit. If you have a tool that splits up the light by it frequency, you can see that there are many colors that make up colored light. And each element has a specific pattern of light that it emits.

There was also a high powered telescope on the roof and we were able to see 2 stars/planets that orbit each other (I forget the technical name for it) and a star cluster.