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A Question And Answer Guide To Astronomy
''A Question and Answer Guide to Astronomy'' is a book about astronomy and cosmology, and is intended for a general audience. The book was written by Pierre-Yves Bely, Carol Christian, and Jean-Rene Roy, and published in English by Cambridge University Press in 2010. It was originally written in French. The content within the book is written using a question and answer format. It contains some 250 questions, which '' The Science Teacher'' states each are answered with a "concise and well-formulated essay that is informative and readable." ''The Science Teacher'' review goes on to state that many of the answers given in the book are "little gems of science writing". ''The Science Teacher'' summarizes by stating that each question is likely to be thought of by a student, and that "the answers are informative, well constructed, and thorough". The book covers information about the planets, the Earth, the Universe, practical astronomy, history, and awkward questions such as astrono ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pierre-Yves Bely
Pierre-Yves is a given name. Notable people with the name include: *Pierre-Yves André (born 1974), retired French footballer * Pierre-Yves Barré (1749–1832), French vaudevillist and songwriter *Pierre-Yves Bény (born 1983), French gymnast *Pierre-Yves Borgeaud, Swiss film director *Pierre-Yves Bournazel (born 1977), French politician *Pierre-Yves Cardinal, Canadian film and television actor * Pierre Yves Clouin, video artist and filmmaker * Pierre-Yves Collombat (born 1945), member of the Senate of France * Pierre-Yves Corthals (born 1975), Belgian auto racing driver *Pierre-Yves Gerbeau (born 1965), French businessman, based in the United Kingdom * Pierre Yves Lenik (born 1958), French composer, known for his work in French documentaries *Pierre-Yves Maillard (born 1968), Swiss politician of the Social Democratic Party *Pierre-Yves Melançon, Canadian politician and a City Councillor in Montreal, Quebec *Pierre-Yves Monette (born 1960), the former secretary-general of EUREAU *P ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Earth
Earth is the third planet from the Sun and the only astronomical object known to harbor life. While large volumes of water can be found throughout the Solar System, only Earth sustains liquid surface water. About 71% of Earth's surface is made up of the ocean, dwarfing Earth's polar ice, lakes, and rivers. The remaining 29% of Earth's surface is land, consisting of continents and islands. Earth's surface layer is formed of several slowly moving tectonic plates, which interact to produce mountain ranges, volcanoes, and earthquakes. Earth's liquid outer core generates the magnetic field that shapes the magnetosphere of the Earth, deflecting destructive solar winds. The atmosphere of the Earth consists mostly of nitrogen and oxygen. Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere like carbon dioxide (CO2) trap a part of the energy from the Sun close to the surface. Water vapor is widely present in the atmosphere and forms clouds that cover most of the planet. More solar energy is rec ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Astronomy Books
Astronomy () is a natural science that studies celestial objects and phenomena. It uses mathematics, physics, and chemistry in order to explain their origin and evolution. Objects of interest include planets, moons, stars, nebulae, galaxies, and comets. Relevant phenomena include supernova explosions, gamma ray bursts, quasars, blazars, pulsars, and cosmic microwave background radiation. More generally, astronomy studies everything that originates beyond Earth's atmosphere. Cosmology is a branch of astronomy that studies the universe as a whole. Astronomy is one of the oldest natural sciences. The early civilizations in recorded history made methodical observations of the night sky. These include the Babylonians, Greeks, Indians, Egyptians, Chinese, Maya, and many ancient indigenous peoples of the Americas. In the past, astronomy included disciplines as diverse as astrometry, celestial navigation, observational astronomy, and the making of calendars. Nowadays, professional ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Astronomy And Astronomers
Astronomy () is a natural science that studies celestial objects and phenomena. It uses mathematics, physics, and chemistry in order to explain their origin and evolution. Objects of interest include planets, moons, stars, nebulae, galaxies, and comets. Relevant phenomena include supernova explosions, gamma ray bursts, quasars, blazars, pulsars, and cosmic microwave background radiation. More generally, astronomy studies everything that originates beyond Earth's atmosphere. Cosmology is a branch of astronomy that studies the universe as a whole. Astronomy is one of the oldest natural sciences. The early civilizations in recorded history made methodical observations of the night sky. These include the Babylonians, Greeks, Indians, Egyptians, Chinese, Maya, and many ancient indigenous peoples of the Americas. In the past, astronomy included disciplines as diverse as astrometry, celestial navigation, observational astronomy, and the making of calendars. Nowada ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Large Numbers
Large numbers are numbers significantly larger than those typically used in everyday life (for instance in simple counting or in monetary transactions), appearing frequently in fields such as mathematics, cosmology, cryptography, and statistical mechanics. They are typically large positive integers, or more generally, large positive real numbers, but may also be other numbers in other contexts. Googology is the study of nomenclature and properties of large numbers. In the everyday world Scientific notation was created to handle the wide range of values that occur in scientific study. 1.0 × 109, for example, means one billion, or a 1 followed by nine zeros: 1 000 000 000. The reciprocal, 1.0 × 10−9, means one billionth, or 0.000 000 001. Writing 109 instead of nine zeros saves readers the effort and hazard of counting a long series of zeros to see how large the number is. Examples of large numbers describing everyday real-world objects include: * The ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Big Bang
The Big Bang event is a physical theory that describes how the universe expanded from an initial state of high density and temperature. Various cosmological models of the Big Bang explain the evolution of the observable universe from the earliest known periods through its subsequent large-scale form. These models offer a comprehensive explanation for a broad range of observed phenomena, including the abundance of light elements, the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, and large-scale structure. The overall uniformity of the Universe, known as the flatness problem, is explained through cosmic inflation: a sudden and very rapid expansion of space during the earliest moments. However, physics currently lacks a widely accepted theory of quantum gravity that can successfully model the earliest conditions of the Big Bang. Crucially, these models are compatible with the Hubble–Lemaître law—the observation that the farther away a galaxy is, the faster it is mo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Extraterrestrial Life
Extraterrestrial life, colloquially referred to as alien life, is life that may occur outside Earth and which did not originate on Earth. No extraterrestrial life has yet been conclusively detected, although efforts are underway. Such life might range from simple forms like prokaryotes to intelligent beings, possibly bringing forth civilizations that might be far more advanced than humankind. The Drake equation speculates about the existence of sapient life elsewhere in the universe. The science of extraterrestrial life is known as astrobiology. Speculation about the possibility of inhabited "worlds" outside the planet Earth dates back to antiquity. Multiple early Christian writers discussed the idea of a "plurality of worlds" as proposed by earlier thinkers such as Democritus; Augustine references Epicurus's idea of innumerable worlds "throughout the boundless immensity of space" (originally expressed in his Letter to Herodotus) in ''The City of God''. In his first century p ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Astronomy In The Bible
Biblical cosmology is the biblical writers' conception of the cosmos as an organised, structured entity, including its origin, order, meaning and destiny. The Bible was formed over many centuries, involving many authors, and reflects shifting patterns of religious belief; consequently, its cosmology is not always consistent. Nor do the biblical texts necessarily represent the beliefs of all Jews or Christians at the time they were put into writing: the majority of the texts making up the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament in particular represent the beliefs of only a small segment of the ancient Israelite community, the members of a late Judean religious tradition centered in Jerusalem and devoted to the exclusive worship of Yahweh. The ancient Israelites envisaged the universe as a flat disc-shaped Earth floating on water, heaven above, underworld below. Humans inhabited Earth during life and the underworld after death; there was no way that mortals could enter heaven, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Universe
The universe is all of space and time and their contents, including planets, stars, galaxies, and all other forms of matter and energy. The Big Bang theory is the prevailing cosmological description of the development of the universe. According to this theory, space and time emerged together ago, and the universe has been expanding ever since the Big Bang. While the spatial size of the entire universe is unknown, it is possible to measure the size of the observable universe, which is approximately 93 billion light-years in diameter at the present day. Some of the earliest cosmological models of the universe were developed by ancient Greek and Indian philosophers and were geocentric, placing Earth at the center. Over the centuries, more precise astronomical observations led Nicolaus Copernicus to develop the heliocentric model with the Sun at the center of the Solar System. In developing the law of universal gravitation, Isaac Newton built upon Copernicus's work as wel ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Planets
A planet is a large, rounded astronomical body that is neither a star nor its remnant. The best available theory of planet formation is the nebular hypothesis, which posits that an interstellar cloud collapses out of a nebula to create a young protostar orbited by a protoplanetary disk. Planets grow in this disk by the gradual accumulation of material driven by gravity, a process called accretion. The Solar System has at least eight planets: the terrestrial planets Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars, and the giant planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. These planets each rotate around an axis tilted with respect to its orbital pole. All of them possess an atmosphere, although that of Mercury is tenuous, and some share such features as ice caps, seasons, volcanism, hurricanes, tectonics, and even hydrology. Apart from Venus and Mars, the Solar System planets generate magnetic fields, and all except Venus and Mercury have natural satellites. The giant planets bear ring syst ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Carol Christian
Carol Ann Christian (born 28 December 1950) is an American astronomer and science communicator, who works for the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI; the science operations center for the Hubble Space Telescope) as a scientist on the institute's outreach program. Christian was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, and studied astronomy and physics at Boston University, from which she graduated with a PhD in 1979 with a thesis on ''Investigations of distant field stars and clusters in the galactic anticenter''. She then worked as an astronomer for University of California, Berkeley. In 1992, Christian and her colleagues decided to establish Eureka Scientific as a conduit for grant applications of non-tenure-track astronomers after UC Berkeley did not sponsor her NASA grant proposal due to the lack of any tenure-track faculty position. In August 1995, Christian was selected as the first head of STScI's new Office of Public Outreach after a national search. She has continued to act as an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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