My Takeaways from My First Years of Astrophysics Learning

Before taking the course Astronomy: Exploring Time and Space I had what I would consider a foundational knowledge of Astronomy. While I was up to date with many of recent happenings in the field, like a new picture of a black hole and the discovery of possible remnants of live on Mars, I didn’t fully appreciate the subject for what it was: the oldest science with millennia of intriguing history and its uniqueness in relying on measurements of things we cannot physically touch.

The first thing that stood out to me was how astronomy was, how similar yet different it was when compared with other sciences; it still relies on the formulation, the testing of hypotheses and experiments while measuring objects trillions of miles away. I was aware that astronomers primarily used electromagnetic radiation to collect data but never truly processed that there was no practical alternative. This thought in turn made me realize just how crucial telescopes were; they didn’t just let us see in greater detail but also possessed the ability to view regions of the universe otherwise inaccessible.

What I learned the most from this course was the richness of astronomy’s history. Many centuries before modern technology, ancient civilizations like the Egyptians and Neolithic farmers created structures not just for worship or because of pride but also to study the universe. Travelers and sailors used the Polaris to signify the true north long before manmade compasses. This made me realize that astronomy was not a “new” science in any sense of the word but that it has been intertwined with survival and civilization in general.

The course also connected astrophysics to physics in foundational physics. Gaining a deeper understanding of the four fundamental forces, gravity, the weak and strong nuclear forces and electromagnetism, showed how everything from atoms to galaxies are subject to the same rules.

One of the interstellar objects I didn’t have a great degree of knowledge of prior to the course was the exoplanet. The Doppler Method (measuring the wobble in a star's orbit caused by the existence of planetary gravitational fields) and transit method (analyzing how the brightness of a star changes when a planet is in between the sun and the Earth) of identifying these planets showed how much we can learn from tiny changes in the radiation we receive from space.

The main thing I took home from this course was that it wasn’t just about stars or planets but also how astronomers are and have been persevering for thousands of years even when direct experimentation is impossible. Now, the universe to me seems less like an abstraction and more like a system that we can meaningfully study even if we are limited to studying it with only one of our senses.