Tres-4b-blog - ✰

The First Galaxies: What We Know And What We Still Need To Learn

“As we look farther back in time, we find that younger galaxies formed stars at faster rates than galaxies do today. We can measure the star-formation rate, and find that at earlier and earlier times, it was more intense. But then we find it hits a peak when the Universe is about two billion years old. Go younger than that, and the rate goes down again.”

We’ve come incredibly far in our quest to learn how the Universe came to be the way it is today. We can see out in space for tens of billions of light years, to galaxies as they were when the Universe was only a few percent of its present age. We can see how galaxies evolve, merge and the stars inside change. And we can see to even before that, when no stars or galaxies existed at all. But how did we get from there to here? There are still plenty of gaps in the story. We’ve never seen the first stars or galaxies; we’ve never witnessed the start of cosmic reionization; we’ve never seen the star formation rate jump from zero to a real, finite number. Yet with James Webb and WFIRST on the horizon, these gaps in our knowledge may – if we’re lucky – all disappear.

Come get the story on what we know about the first galaxies, and what we hope and have left to still learn!

Windows 3.0 - Interview with Bill Gates (1991

This is Earth, our amazing home. The only planet in the solar system with the ability to harbor life (that we know of).

This is the distance between our awesome planet and the moon. 

Doesn’t look that far does it? How about if I told you that you could fit EVERY planet in our solar system neatly in that distance. 

Speaking of the other planets in our solar system, this is them & this is where our amazing planet resides.

The moon’s our cute little companion. This is the United States compared to it.

The planets in the solar system are so cool. This is what North America looks like in comparison to Jupiter. 

Speaking of Jupiter and the moon, this is what it would look like if Jupiter was in the place of the moon. (The white dot is our moon). 

Earth compared to Saturn (well 6 Earths…)

Ever wonder about what Earth would look like if it had rings like Saturn? Well wonder no more.. 

Amazing right? Want to see something cooler? Here is the Earth compared to our Sun. 

Here’s what we look like from the moon

And from Mars

From Saturn 

From Neptune…

Here is what the Sun looks like from Mars

Remember what Carl Sagan said? There are more stars in space than grains of sand on every beach in the Earth. 

That’s a lot right? That only means there are stars way larger than our Sun..like this one for example: 

And there are stars bigger than that….

Stars are huge, but the galaxy is even bigger. If you shrunk the Sun down to the size of a white blood cell, the Milky Way Galaxy would be the size of the United States. 

This is where the Earth is in our huge galaxy 

You know all the stars we see in the sky? These are the ones we only ever see (this isn’t our galaxy but its very similar)

The Milky Way is so big that the last time the Earth was in this exact position in the galaxy, the dinosaurs were here

Even though our galaxy is huge, there are galaxies that are even bigger…

This picture from Hubble shows thousands of thousands of thousands of galaxies that each have their own stars with their own planets…

Here is one of the galaxies in that picture. It is 10 BILLION light years away. When we look at it, we are looking 10 BILLION YEARS BACK IN TIME

And just to keep this in mind, this is a very small portion of the sky that was believed to be empty…

Everything is relative. 

Next time you’re stressed out or worried about something, stop and take a step back. Look up at the sky and think about all of the things that are out there. All the stars being born, the stars dying, galaxies colliding. 

We live in such an amazing universe, and we are only an extremely tiny part of it. 

Credit- pictures from: Buzzfeed on Facebook

Each second, 1.5 million tons of solar material shoot off the Sun into space. The magnetosphere shields Earth, but the solar wind can get in near the poles and disrupt satellite, radio & GPS signals

Mathematics formulas

Cover art for Programming the 8086/8088 by James Colton

Disclaimer: As always, this is a guide on how I like to study maths and how I did well in final exams- but of course doesn’t work for everyone! These are only suggestions. ´･ᴗ･`

Mindset- A lot of people dislike maths and a big reason (from experience) is that people believe that it is too hard/ don’t understand. The great thing with maths that is different to subjective classes like English- if you know all of your concepts and formulae, you WILL do well. Your mind will help you pull through. Maths in honestly not that difficult. Everything that is hard is really just the concepts you know, in a more creative way.

The Mistake Palm card- Any silly errors you make- put down onto a palm card in terms of topic. For example, on my “Sketching graphs” topic, a mistake I make is not marking the point of inflexion. Things like not forgetting to mark your axes, label a point etc. go here.

The Mistake Word document- your mistakes from practice tests, exams at school and questions you don’t know how to solve initially all go on this. Scan/ take a photo and dump it into Word. This is for you to go over a few months later (or before your test) to make sure you know how to do the question! Mine ended up being 20+ for my HSC exam and it definitely helped!

Formulae Palm card- Same as the mistakes palm card, just dump all your formulae and you can carry it around in your pocket to read on the train or wherever you go.

Practice!- Practice papers are the most important thing. Exercises from your textbook are great, but you have to do past papers more so. This is to get familiar with format, tricky questions that could be asked and how fast you can do one.

Study depth, not breadth- Doing question after question from the textbook is not smart studying. A lot of those questions are the same thing but with different numbers so you’re not really giving yourself benefit of different formats. A lot of people saying they “study a lot” when they do this but you have to expose yourself to different kinds of questions. Know when to skip questions if you get the concept and to repeat if you don’t understand.

Timed Conditions- Practice papers under timed conditions are great at home. Aim to do the whole paper in 80-90% of the time to make sure you have time to check in tests! However in Australia, the HSC exam is 3 hours for mathematics when it only takes 1- 1.5 hours to complete- if you’re at home and you finish checking before time is up- just mark it. You’re wasting time by waiting for 3 hours when you could do two more tests in that time.

Don’t Repeat Papers- Don’t repeat papers! Repeat the questions you got wrong. This is because you’ve seen the questions before, and you know what to do. Try to find more practice papers on the internet instead.

I hope this helped anyone who does Mathematics- this probably works best with HSC since I don’t really know how overseas exams work. Thank you!!

Jade

xx