Gamma ray bursts are, quite literally, bursts of gamma rays coming from distant galaxies, that are suspected to come from extremely energetic explosions. This then later contributed to the work by astronomers that demonstrated that galaxies are expanding away from us even faster than predicted, based on the redshifts of distant supernovae, as mentioned earlier in this article. Hubble’s Law allowed for the calculation of the speed at which galaxies are receding away from Earth, which demonstrates that galaxies are moving away from us, and thus provided the general basis for the Big Bang Theory. Largely verified through a variety of tests, one of the most famous proofs of general relativity occurred during a solar eclipse, during which the light from visible stars was mapped and extrapolated to locate the stars, which appeared in a different place than the stars actually were, due to the warping of light. General relativity is one of the theories presented by Albert Einstein, which proposes a unified description of gravity as a property of space and time, and allows for proper explanation of redshift of light and bending of light by massive objects.
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Astrophysicists now believe that super-massive black holes exist at the center of most spiral galaxies and most galaxies in general. Now, astrophysicists believe that black holes form as the result of larger stars collapsing and the electron and neutron degeneracy pressure cannot hold even atoms intact.
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Beyond the event horizon, nothing can be seen and nothing can escape. By analyzing the light spectra coming from distant stars, and also their brightness plotted over time, astronomers have been able to discover a large number of planets, starting in 1992 with the discovery of several planets orbiting a pulsar.īlack holes, which are largely known due to Stephen Hawking’s work, are a region of space where nothing, not even light, can escape, due to the massive gravitational pull from a single point in space with infinite density, known as a singularity.
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The CMBR is essentially the remaining radiation left from a previous stage in the universe’s history, currently theorized as the Big Bang.Īfter discovering the various planets and non-planetary objects in our solar system, astronomers began looking at other stars in attempts to discover new planets. Two Bell Telephone employees were working on a radiometer for satellite communication experiments, when they discovered 3.5 K in excess temperature that they could not account for. Thus, a new type of matter was classified as dark matter, which is matter that is simply not detected using current measurement techniques involving electromagnetic radiation.Ĭosmic microwave background radiation, or CMBR, is a form of electromagnetic radiation that fills the universe and is left over from the Big Bang. When astronomers were able to measure the mass of galaxies and the orbital speed of stars within a galaxy, they noticed discrepancies between the expected results and the calculated results.
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Whether it is a scalar property of space time itself, as proposed through a cosmological constant, or something dynamic, known as quintessence, is a matter of large debate, but current astrophysics places a full 74% of the energy in the universe as being dark energy.ĭark matter (different from Dark Energy) is a type of matter that has been proposed to exist to explain gravitational effects within galaxies.
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To account for this, a hypothetical form of energy known as Dark Energy has been proposed and is being investigated by leading astrophysicists and cosmologists. While certainly some of the greatest discoveries in astronomy of all time include the discovery of the other planets of the solar system, the true relation of the Earth to the Sun, and the mathematical calculations for planetary orbits by Kepler and universal gravitation by Newton, more shocking discoveries have been made in modern astronomy than in times past, and shows us just how cool our universe actually is.Īs we’ll discuss later in this article, it has been discovered using the Hubble constant and measurements of supernovae of distant stars that the universe is not contracting, nor is it static (as Einstein thought), but instead, the universe is expanding, and the expansion is speeding up. Astronomy has come a long way in the past 100 years, with revelations from Einstein, Bohr, Hubble and other great astronomers, physicists, and scientists.