Escape The Science Lab

Looking up at the night sky, you will see dozens of stars. If you live in a very dark place, you may even see hundreds. The thing that people find difficult to grasp is just how far away these stars are. Our sun is 150 million km away from earth. If you could travel at the speed of light, which is as fastest you can go, it would take 8 minutes to get there. To get to the next nearest star at the speed of light, you would be travelling for 4 years (that's without toilet stops). Other objects are much further away. There are billions of galaxies outside of our Milky Way. Light from one of the nearest takes over 2 million years to reach earth. That is truly a galaxy far, far away. This is the Andromeda Galaxy, the farthest object you can see with the naked eye. We can't get to the stars to study them, so how do we find out how they work? The answer is light. We use telescopes to collect light from the stars and watch them move and change. Some telescopes detect light that we can...

 You may of heard how Galileo got into trouble for claiming that the Earth orbits the Sun. Did you know there were others that were saying the same thing? In the 16th century, Johannes Kepler was one of these. He was an astronomer who took measurements of the stars, but also an astrologer, producing horoscopes for the rich and powerful. Back then, the lines between science and mysticism were blurred and Isaac Newton himself was as much an alchemist as a scientist.  Kepler took measurements of the movements of the planets, checking the measurements of other natural philosophers*. You can easily see planets with the naked eye, binoculars, or telescopes. They look like bright stars, but they move from night-to-night, giving them their name 'planetai' or 'wanderer'. Back in the 16th century six planets had been discovered.  Kepler's idea of how they moved in their orbits was mixed with some ideas that we may find strange today. He combined his measurements with ideas th...