THE

TIMES
SPACE
 PREFA
CE
When the Italian scientist Galileo Galilei turned his first primitive
telescope on the night sky nearly 400 years ago he saw some
unexpected wonders in the night sky that would eventually change the
way how the humans would look at the sky forever. Out in the celestial
environment what humans discovered simply put into words was
amazing. If someone from a thousand years back would have been told
that there exists a world {far larger than the place we call home} he
would have laughed it off, but thanks to the advancement in science
and technology their fantasy is today’s reality. The sun, moon, earth,
and everything that we can see in the cosmos was once nothing but
free quarks roaming around nothingness but after the concept of space
and time came into being in a primeval fireball which we refer to as the
Big Bang explosion. We do not know for sure what happened before
the big bang was there something in the universe or not. Everything we
know and study about space and all the concepts of time and physic
started from this very point called the big bang. Apart from the big
bang there are still a lot of mysteries that the space hold for the
humanity such as the black holes, their existence, whether intelligent
life other than human beings exists or not and if so then can we
establish contact with them or not. The people who study space in
particular are called astronomers and the field is called astronomy.
 CONT
 Earth, Moon and Stars
 Sun and Stars
ENTS
 Galaxies and the Universe
 SYN
CHP OPS
1: Earth, Moon and Stars

ISPLAN
ETS
A planetary-mass object or planetary body is a celestial object
with a mass that falls within the range of the definition of a planet:
massive enough to achieve hydrostatic equilibrium (to be rounded
under its own gravity), but not enough to sustain core fusion like a
star. By definition, all planets are planetary-mass objects.
There are many different types of planets
 Dwarf planets
 Rogue planets
 Former stars
 DWARF
A dwarf planet is a planetary-mass object that is neither a true
PLANE
planet nor a natural satellite; it is in direct orbit of a star, and is
massive enough for its gravity to compress it into a
TS
hydrostatically equilibrious shape (usually a spheroid), but has
not cleared the neighborhood of other material around its orbit.

PLUTO THE DWARF PLANET

 ROGU
Several computer Esimulations of stellar and planetary system
formation have suggested that some objects of planetary mass
PLANE
would be ejected into interstellar space. Some scientists have
argued that such objects found roaming in deep space should be
TS
classed as "Rogue planets", although others have suggested to
call them brown dwarfs.
 FORM
ER
The shrinking star can then become a planetary-mass object.
After the death of a star they undergo shrinking process where
they lose their mass as well as their status of star and are then
STARS
seen as big as planets.
 SOLAR
SYSTE
Our solar system consists of a star and a total of 9 planets out which
only one can sustain life. Pluto is the only planet that is considered as a

M
dwarf planet (so the first 8 are usually counted) whereas all the others
are called as the planets.
 Earth,
the
Earth is the third planet from the Sun and the only astronomical
object known to harbor life. According to radiometric dating and
Blue
other sources of evidence, Earth formed over 4.5 billion years
ago. Earth's gravity interacts with other objects in space,

Marble
especially the Sun and the Moon, which is Earth's only natural
satellite. 
 Moon
The Moon is an astronomical body that orbits the Earth as its
only permanent natural satellite. The Moon is thought to have
formed about 4.51 billion years ago, not long after Earth. The
most widely accepted explanation is that the Moon formed from
the debris left over after a giant impact between Earth and
a Mars-sized body called Theia.
 CHP 2: Sun and Stars

STARS
A star is an astronomical object consisting of a
luminous spheroid of plasma held together by its own gravity. The
nearest star to Earth is the Sun. Many other stars are visible to
the naked eye from Earth during the night, appearing as a
multitude of fixed luminous points in the sky due to their immense
distance from Earth.

STAR
FORM
ATION
A star's life begins with the gravitational collapse of a
gaseous nebula of material composed primarily of hydrogen,
along with helium and trace amounts of heavier elements. When
the stellar core is sufficiently dense, hydrogen becomes steadily
converted into helium through nuclear fusion, releasing energy in
the process. The remainder of the star's interior carries energy
away from the core through a combination
of radiative and convective heat transfer processes. The star's
internal pressure prevents it from collapsing further under its own
gravity.
A star might end up as one of these upon its death according to
its size;
 It might become a red giant.
 A stellar remnant called white dwarf, a neutron star.
 It might just become a black hole.

Red
Giant
The stars whose mass is 0.4 times than that of our sun upon
their deaths (using up all of their hydrogen and helium)
swell up to become enormous red giants and devour the
nearby planets or any other stellar object that comes in

their way.

White
Dwarf
A white dwarf, also called a degenerate dwarf, is a stellar core
remnant composed mostly of electron-degenerate matter. A white
dwarf is very dense: its mass is comparable to that of the Sun,
while its volume is comparable to that of Earth. A white dwarf's
faint luminosity comes from the emission of stored thermal
energy; no fusion takes place in a white dwarf. The name white
dwarf was coined by Willem Luyten in 1922.

Neutr
on
Stars

A neutron star is the collapsed core of a giant star which before

collapse had a total mass of between 10 and 29 solar masses.
Neutron stars are the smallest and densest stars, excluding black
holes. Neutron stars have a radius on the order of 10 kilometers
(6.2 mi) and a mass of about 1.4 solar masses. They result from
the supernova explosion of a massive star, combined
with gravitational collapse, that compresses the core past white
dwarf star density to that of atomic nuclei.

Black
Holes
Black holes are created in the aftermath of the death of a star whose
mass is at least 3 times than that of our star the sun. The gravitational
pull of the star pulls everything into a small space called the Schwartz
child radius. They have a very strong magnetic field so strong that even
light cannot escape it so hence they roam about invisible in space and a
categorized in three types according to their size and mass.

THE SUN
The Sun is the star at the center of the Solar System. It is a nearly
perfect sphere of hot plasma. It is by far the most important
source of energy for life on Earth. Its diameter is about 1.39
million kilometers (864,000 miles) or 109 times that of Earth,
and its mass is about 330,000 times that of Earth. It accounts for
about 99.86% of the total mass of the Solar System. Roughly
three quarters of the Sun's mass consists of hydrogen (73%) the
rest is mostly helium (25%) with much smaller quantities of
heavier elements, including oxygen, carbon, neon, and iron.
CHP 3: Galaxies and Universe

What
are
A galaxy is a gravitationally bound system of stars, stellar
remnants, interstellar gas, dust, and dark matter. Galaxies range
in size from dwarfs with just a few hundred million (108) stars
Galaxi
to giants with one hundred trillion (1014) stars, each orbiting its

es?
galaxy's center of mass.  The majority of galaxies are
gravitationally organized into groups, clusters, and superclusters.

Milky
Way
He Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy with a diameter between
150,000 and 200,000 light-years. It is estimated to contain 100–
400 billion stars and more than 100 billion planets. The Solar
System is located at a radius of about 27,000 light-years from
the Galactic Center. Galactic center is an intense radio source
known as Sagittarius A*, assumed to be a supermassive black
hole of 4.100 million solar masses.
 Univ
The universe is all of space and time and their contents, including

erse
planets, stars, galaxies, and all other forms of matter and energy.
While the spatial size of the entire Universe is unknown, it is
possible to measure the size of the observable universe, which is
currently estimated to be 93 billion light-years in diameter.
About the Author
Ian
Ridpath
Ridpath attended Beal Grammar School in Ilford where he wrote astronomy
articles for the school magazine. Before entering publishing he was an assistant
in the lunar research group at the University of London Observatory, Mill Hill. He
now lives in Brentford, Middlesex.
He is editor of the Oxford Dictionary of Astronomy and Norton's Star Atlas, and
author of observing guides such as The Monthly Sky Guide and the Collins Stars
and Planets Guide (the latter two with charts by Wil Tirion, and both continuously
in print for over 30 years). His other books include Star Tales, about the origins
and mythology of the constellations, and the children's book Exploring Stars and
Planets, now in its fifth edition. He is a contributor to the Dorling Kindersley
encyclopedia Universe, and a former editor of the UK quarterly magazine Popular
Astronomy. He is also currently editor of The Antiquarian Astronomer, the journal
of the Society for the History of Astronomy.

AGREE
MENTS
/DIS-
AGREE
MENT
WITH
WRITE
R
The author has adopted the realistic approach about astronomy based
upon facts and figures which are recorded by scientists over the course
of our history. He comprehensively covered the entire space in a
language that any lay person could easily understand even though he
had just scratched the space from the surface as space as mentioned in
the universe topic by our estimate is 93 billion light-years so there is no
way any one of us could easily understand it nor can we study all of it
but I totally agree with the viewpoint of the author as he himself said in
the book that we think we have achieved so much and yet there is so
much more that is hidden from our eyes one more thing that I like
about this book is that it presents a possible theory about the mysteries
that have bothered the astronomers for years even though they are
just theories but there is still a great chance that they might be right.

NAME: ZAID BIN NAEEM

 RD
SEMESTER: 3
REG-NO: BSME01183054
SECTION: B