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In all my years of doing "outreach" and "research," I've never found one good answer to that question. It's more like there are about a jillion good answers. Ask the question in a crowd and you get answers like, "Planets." or "What came first, stars or galaxies?" or "Is there life out there?"
Back when I worked on the Griffith exhibits, one of the curators told me that there were six questions they heard the most from visitors:
Why do we have day and night? Why do the stars appear to move across the sky through the night? Why do we have seasons? How do the phases of the Moon work? How do eclipses work? What does the Moon have to do with the tides?
That makes sense, since these are things we can see most directly from our vantage point on the planet. Once you understand those, you are prepped to learn about motions of other planets, the stars, and galaxies. And, we do live in a universe that is constantly in motion.
During one of the press conferences at AAS a week or so back I thought about the questions people ask about astronomy, and contrasted them with the questions astronomers ask about the cosmos. They are complex questions, but no more or less important than the ones "non-astronomers" ask. For example, one set of press conferences focused on black holes. These grab public attention because they're such weird celestial animals. Most people want to know things like, "How do you detect them?" and "What's it like inside one?"
Well, actually, astronomers want to know those things, too, and we have figured out ways to detect them, and know where to look for them. The questions astronomers are now starting to ask are things like "Do they exist in the centers of all galaxies?" and "What properties of black holes tell us about how they form?"
Eventually they'll get the answers, which will find their way into public lectures where audiences can glean a little more about the universe as astronomers see it.
There's not one Big Question about the universe. It's more like a million, billion, trillion little ones that we seek to answer so that we can understand the whys and wherefores of the stars, planets, and galaxies that populate the cosmos.
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Adot's Notblog A fellow traveler blogger and astronomy enthusiast!
Astronomy Blog An astronomy blog pondering the big questions
