AstronoMaestro

So I am going to talk a bit about the Physics GRE. This is a test I spent many hours of my life studying for. I personally scored a 56 percentile on the official test, which isn't terrible. On practice tests I scored from the 30's to the 80's, depending on the test, averaging out in the 60's somewhere. The top of one of the practice GRE Physics tests. This particular test is test GR1777. The practice test can be found on the ETS website https://www.ets.org/s/gre/pdf/practice_book_physics.pdf Usually the people that I have seen defend this test are those who did well on it. To be frank, even though I was getting decent scores, I don't like this test and I do not think that it is a good indicator of talent, ability, or knowledge. I also have a reason for this which is valid regardless of your position on the matter, the reason being the spread of my scores. A question I ended up asking myself was, "Is this massive spread just happening to me? Do all p...

A guide for measuring the distance to far away stars

The Vastness of Space To quote from HitchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy and one of my own publications that I wrote for kids " “Space is big. Space is really big! You just would not believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is." He was not kidding either! Imagine it this way. Pretend you are on the Autobahn in Germany. You are in a Ferrari, zooming at 300 kph (186 mph). If you did not have to stop, you could go around the earth in about 133 hours, or 5 and a half days. Now imagine if your Ferrari suddenly could travel to the sun. It would take nearly 4,000 times longer to get to the sun than to drive around the earth! That is ~22,000 days in the Ferrari! The closest star that is not the sun is called Alpha Centauri , The closest star to our solar system. It is 1.37 parsecs, or 41.53 trillion kilometers, from Earth. To get there, it would be like driving to the sun almost 300,000 times! The closest galaxy, Andromeda, is nearly 600,000 times farther than Alpha Centauri!...

The Science Reasoning Behind Calculating the Sun's Lifespan

We all know and love the sun (hopefully anyway). It's the brightest thing in the sky from our perspective here on earth. The Sun provides all the energy necessary for things to live on earth. Without the Sun's power, the only things that would be left, are maybe some very exotic forms of bacteria and ocean life that rely on hydrothermal vents on the bottom of the ocean. An incredibly photo of the sun provided by the European Space Agency's Solar Orbiter. Without this brilliantly hot and extremely stable star, life on Earth as we know it would be entirely impossible. You can read more about it here . Credit: Solar Orbiter/EUI Team/ ESA & NASA; CSL, IAS, MPS, PMOD/WRC, ROB, UCL/MSSL How The Sun Creates Energy The sun is extremely stable and is currently in the phase known as the main sequence stage. Stars undergo this phase as a part of their life cycle. We call it the main sequence stage since this is the main Hydrogen burning phase of our Sun's life cycle. To expla...