What is ASTRONOMY?
*Humans have long gazed toward the heavens, searching to put meaning and
order to the universe around them. Although the movement of
constellations — patterns imprinted on the night sky — were the easiest
to track, other celestial events such as eclipses and the motion of
planets were also charted and predicted.
Astronomy is the study of the sun, moon, stars, planets, comets, gas,
galaxies, gas, dust and other non-Earthly bodies and phenomena. In
curriculum for K-4 students, NASA defines astronomy as simple "the study
of stars, planets and space." Astronomy and astrology were historically
associated, but astrology is not science
and is no longer recognized as having anything to do with astronomy.
Below we discuss the history of astronomy and related fields of study,
including cosmology.
Historically, astronomy has focused on observations of heavenly bodies.
It is a close cousin to astrophysics. Succinctly put, astrophysics
involves the study of the physics of astronomy and concentrates on the
behavior, properties and motion of objects out there. However, modern
astronomy includes many elements of the motions and characteristics of
these bodies, and the two terms are often used interchangeably today.
Observation from Astronomers video: https://www.space.com/16014-astronomy.html
Unlike most other fields of science, astronomers are unable to observe a
system entirely from birth to death; the lifetime of worlds, stars, and
galaxies span millions to billions of years. Instead, astronomers must
rely on snapshots of bodies in various stages of evolution to determine
how they formed, evolved and died. Thus, theoretical and observational
astronomy tend to blend together, as theoretical scientists use the
information actually collected to create simulations, while the
observations serve to confirm the models — or to indicate the need for
tweaking them.
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