PLANETARIUM PRESENTATION OUTLINE

Cosmological Scavenger Hunt

-Two teams:
- Team Galileo
- Team Hubble
-Format: hint/fun fact about each destination, tally points for which team gets the most
right, at the end, winning team gets candy or some other prize
-if you yell the answer before I’m finished asking the question the other team
automatically gets the point

-We’ll start out easy, right within our home solar system!
Look at: solar system
Unselect all planetary objects
Observing speed X10000000

-Alright first question: For this one there are two acceptable answers!
Most planets in the solar system rotate counter clockwise, except this one: Venus or
Uranus!
Look at: solar system
Select: Venus
Observing speed X10000000 (or X10000 for Uranus)
Venus rotates clockwise in what is called retrograde motion, and Uranus spins on its
side.There are many theories as to why Venus and Uranus rotate differently than all the
other planets in the solar system. The most popular theory right now states that at one
point, both planets did rotate the same direction as the others. But at some point of time,
some major collision caused the planet to flip around its axis. So it continued spinning in
the same direction, but flipped itself over, and the rotation looks reversed to us. One day
on Venus is the same as 243 Earth days, and at its equator you could actually jog faster
than the planet spins! One day on Venus would be longer than a year on Venus, which
is about 224 years.

-Next question:
This moon is thought to have twice as much water as Earth: Europa!
Look at: solar system
Select: Europa
Observing speed X1000
Europa is one of the Galilean moons that orbits Jupiter, and its surface is mostly frozen
Water. Europa is thought to have twice as much water as does Earth. Even though most
of it is ice, it is still really exciting to astrobiologists because water is one of the first
indicators they look for in a habitable planet. Europa has the smoothest surface of any
known object in the solar system, and the low number of craters on Europa leads
scientists to believe that a subsurface ocean may still exist today. So one thing that
 scientists and engineers are looking at is how can get through the icy surface and see
what’s underneath? The most likely reason for the criss-cross lines on Europa is caused
by eruptions from series of ice volcanoes. These eruptions are thought to have been
caused in large part by the pull of Jupiter. Pretty exciting place!

Alright, that was all pretty cool but I think it’s time we think a little bit bigger!

-Next question:
This mythological hunter is familiar sight in the fall and winter night sky in the northern
Hemisphere: Orion Constellation
Look at: Sky
Layers: Constellations → figures and pictures
Orion is one of the most famous constellations due to its noticeability in the night sky--
very bright and easy to spot. The higher the constellation Orion is in the sky, the easier it
is to see: in northern hemisphere it will be highest in February at around 8pm. You can
see some familiar stars, Betelgeuse (top left) and Rigel (top right) in opposite corners.
However, the Orion constellation is home to a lot more than just stars. The brightest spot
in Orion’s sword is the Orion nebula, which is around 1344 light years away, and one of
the easiest nebulae to see with naked eye.
Uncheck constellation pictures: zoom in on Orion Nebula
What is a nebula?
Nebulae are massive clouds of dust, hydrogen and helium gas, and plasma. Some
nebulae are remnants of dead or dying stars, and others are the opposite: star-forming
regions referred to as stellar nurseries. Orion falls into the stellar nursery category, and
is
a very active star formation site.

-Next question:
This nebula is also located in the orion constellation and is visible mostly due to its
darkness: Horsehead Nebula (also known as Barnard 33 after astronomy)!
Move up and left from Orion Nebula slightly, rotate screen to show horsehead shape, overlay
image
The horsehead nebula is around 1,500 light years from Earth, and unlike Orion it is very
difficult to find in the sky as an amateur The reason it looks like this is because it is a
very cold, dark cloud of mostly hydrogen dust that is silhouetted against a much brighter
nebula called IC434, which leads to the famous horsehead shape. Eventually ultraviolet
light from nearby stars will the gas cloud and this formation will disperse, but for now it
remains a pretty spectacular sight.

-Next question:
This nebula caused a lot of commotion among astronomers in 1054 AD when the
supernova that caused it to form first became visible: The Crab Nebula!
 The supernova was first documented by Chinese astronomers around a thousand years
ago, and the remnants we see today have formed the amazing Crab Nebula. At its
center is a pulsing neutron star, which is basically an extremely small, extremely dense
star core. Neutron stars form when massive stars collapse and all the protons and
electrons are scrunched together into a tiny space about 12 miles across on average.
That’s 1.3-2.5 solar masses in a space barely bigger than Bainbridge Island! To put it
another way, a sugar-cube-sized amount of this material would weigh more than 1 billion
tons, about the same as Mount Everest!

-We’ll do one more nebula because they’re pretty cool looking!

-Next question:
This is another famous nebula, but this one is formed by a dying star's outer layers
unraveling into space, and intense ultraviolet radiation being pumped out of the core-- and it
kind of looks like an eye. Helix Nebula!

Now I want to briefly talk about the coloring on these photos. With the naked eye, most
astronomical objects are pretty faint, even through a telescope, and will look black and
white to us. The brightest objects may have a slight shades of green or possibly red.
Pictures like these are taken in black and white with filters for different wavelengths of
light, including those not in the visible spectrum, and then edited and assigned different
colors to make the details and colors visible to us. Ie. hydrogen atoms as green, sulfur
as red, and so on.
The brighter purple circle in the very center is the combined ultraviolet and infrared glow of a
dusty disk circling the white dwarf

-Next question:
How old is the Milky Way galaxy? 13.6 billion years old!
Look at: Solar System
Uncheck: constellations, grids
Zoom out
The Milky Way is of course our home galaxy, and is about 100,000 light years across.
We know that it is a spiral galaxy that looks something like this by studying other
galaxies and measuring star velocities and hydrogen distributions. We know that it is a
mid-sized galaxy, which means it has around 100-400 billion stars. I know that doesn’t
seem like a very good estimate, the reason there is such a big range is because it really
depends on what model is used to approximate the number of stars in the galaxy, as
well as what number is used as the average mass of a star.

Fun fact: Just over a month ago, astronomers finished collecting data that might lead to
the first ever image of a black hole! Well, we can’t exactly see a black hole, but what we
should be able to see is the event horizon due to radiation given off by objects falling into
the black hole. They used a network of 8 observatories across the world known as the
Event Horizon Telescope to zero in on Sagittarius A* which is the black hole at the
center of our galaxy, as well as on the center of the nearby galaxy M87 where there is a
black hole thought to be around 1500 times more massive than ours. These are the
 preliminary stages of imaging a black hole, and it will take months to analyze the data,
but even if nothing comes out of this first attempt, it’s a really great start to the path of
understanding more about these mysterious objects.

-Next question:
How far away is the Andromeda galaxy? 2.5 million light years away
Look at: Sky
Search: andromeda, andromeda galaxy
At 2.5 million lya, Andromeda is the furthest thing in the galaxy that we can see with our naked
eye. That being said, it is the closest spiral galaxy to the Milky Way, making it our neighbor in
the Local Group, and is an extremely helpful tool in studying galaxies like our own. Since
Andromeda is so massive and relatively close, there is a strong gravitational pull between our
galaxies. That means that unlike most other objects in the universe, Andromeda is actually
moving towards us, and we are moving towards it!

To check out what this kind of collision might look like, let’s head on over to NGC 6050
Search: NGC 6050 or 6786
This collision is inevitable and estimated to happen in about 4 billion years. There’s good news
and bad new here: the good news is that Earth and the rest of our solar system aren’t going to
be destroyed or smashed into space dust, so no need to worry about that! Since galaxies are
mostly vast empty space, the chance of even two stars colliding is pretty minimal. The bad news
is that in 4 billion years the sun will be reaching the end of its life anyway and Earth will be a
barren wasteland. But it’s okay, the hope is that mankind will be long gone by then anyway or
robots will have eradicated the human race.

I know it’s kind of a touchy subject because hey, it’s our Earth and our galaxy, and it’s strange to
think that a very long time from now the Milky Way and Andromeda will have formed a
completely new, different galaxy, and that Earth will be uninhabitable, and that the universe as
we know it will be an entirely different place, right?

But let’s put things into perspective:

Our sun is one of billions of stars in the Milky Way-- the galaxy we call home. The Milky Way is
one of dozens of galaxies in the Local Group, which is the next stop on our cosmic address, and
one of thousands in the Virgo Supercluster. There are hundreds of billions of galaxies in the
observable universe, and past the observable universe, who even knows? And yet, somehow,
in all of this madness and emptiness, all of these collisions and explosions and barren planets,
we managed to be in the right place at the right time, and here we are, still going strong! Now
I’m not trying to get all Carl Sagan on you here, but basically if you take one thing away from
this talk, it’s make the most out of it.