Genevieve Hynes

12/9/15

CORC 3301
Cosmology Extra Credit: Museum of Natural History
Today I went to The Museum of Natural History to explore the Rose Center for Earth and
Space. I weighed myself on different planets and examined the many tapestries of different parts
of our universe. I also saw two different short videos. One of the videos was being played at the
bottom level of the center in a small black room. The video I saw was called AstroBulletin:
Stories of the Observable

Universe. This video talked about Project 1640. Project 1640 is a

project whose end goal is to gather more information about planets outside our solar system. One
of the problems the scientists working on this project face is that the light from the stars
surrounding the planets are so bright, but the planets themselves are dim. In order to combat this,
they use an adaptive optic system and wavefront control system , which basically blocks out the
light of the stars. They then snap about 32 photos of each star and make them into a short movie
to examine the exoplanets near them (look for the specks of light that do not move). They hope
to categorize exoplanet systems with this information.
I also watched a short video in the Hayden Planetarium (which kind of looks like the
Death Star from Star Wars) on the Big Bang. After the video was over, I walked down the huge
ramp that maps out the time from the Big Bang to the present. It starts at 13 billion years ago (0
billion years since the Big Bang). Along this timeline, one foot is 45 million years and one meter
is 147 million years. Each station has a few panels containing important information from the
last billion years. It also has measurements of light from different radio galaxies (how long it
takes the light to reach us). When we get towards the present, it says what signs of life existed at

that time (multicellular life forms, age of the dinosaurs, finally, us). It really put in perspective
how young we are as a species in comparison to the age of the universe.