The Milky Way Department of Physics银河系物理系.pptVIP

Note that the following lectures include animations and PowerPoint effects such as fly ins and transitions that require you to be in PowerPoints Slide Show mode (presentation mode). The Scale of the Cosmos Chapter 1 Guidepost Guidepost (continued) Scales of Size and Time A Campus Scene A City View The Landscape of Pennsylvania The Earth Earth and Moon Earth Orbiting Around the Sun Earth Orbiting Around the Sun (2) The Solar System (Almost) Empty Space Around Our Solar System The Solar Neighborhood The Solar Neighborhood (2) The Extended Solar Neighborhood The Milky Way Galaxy The Local Group of Galaxies The Universe on Very Large Scales New Terms * How can we study something so big it includes everything, even us? The cosmos, or the universe as it is more commonly called, is our subject in astronomy. Perhaps the best way to begin our study is to grab a quick impression as we zoom from things our own size up to the largest things in the universe. That cosmic zoom, the subject of this chapter, gives us our first glimpse of the objects we will study in the rest of this book. In the next chapter, we will return to Earth to think about the appearance of the sky, and subsequent chapters will discuss stars, galaxies, and worlds that fill our universe. Our quick survey of the universe in this chapter is more than just a listing of objects. It will illustrate the relations between objects—which are big, which are small, and which are contained inside others. In other words, this chapter will give us perspective for all of our exploration to follow. It is easy to learn a few facts, but it is the relationships between facts that are interesting. The relationships illustrated in this chapter will give us a perspective on our place in the cosmos. While we study the cosmos, we will observe the process by which we learn. That process, science, gives us a powerful way to understand not only the universe but also ourselves. Astronomy deals with objects on a vast range of size