Black Holes, Stars, Planets, Galaxies, and the Cosmos
That’s What I Write About
I’ve been running this blog since just after the Cosmic Dark Ages ended (about the time blogs began), and in it, I write about astronomy and space topics. If you analyze what I’ve written about over the years, you’ll see that I like to write about Mars or black holes, or colliding galaxies, or other such fascinating topics. They are part and parcel of understanding the origin and evolution of everything in the universe.
Black holes are objects that were once just an idea in a scientist’s brain, but as more and more observations of strange objects came through our telescopes, and as we were able to apply the laws of physics, motion, and gravity to explain these observations, our understanding of black holes grew. Today, we find them all over the place — they’re not new objects, but our discovery and understanding of them is relatively new (in the grand scheme of things, as one of my astronomy professors used to say).
Stars are all over the place. The closest one is the Sun, and that’s the one that we based our understanding of other stars — and their formation, evolution, and deaths — upon. Of course, nowadays, we study many different types of stars, and know that the formation is roughly the same for all stars. The evolution is similar, up to a point. The deaths, however, are wildly different, depending on the mass of the star. So, a star like the Sun forms in a cloud of gas and dust, just as every other star does. It consumes nuclear fuel in its core and in return, puts out light and heat. Most stars do that. But,when the Sun dies, it will go quietly — in comparison to a star with several tens of solar masses or larger. Those massive stars will explode as supernovae. Big difference.
In dying, all stars lose mass to the cosmos. That mass, in the form of gas and dust, enriches the interstellar medium, and from that “enrichment” we get the materials from which other stars — and planets (and comets, asteroids, rings, moons) are made. Planets are the ashes of dead stars… as are we, since we evolved on a planet, and our bodies contain the same materials.
All stars and planets are part of galaxies, which are huge conglomerations of stars and varying amounts of interstellar material. Galaxies first formed a few hundred million years after the universe began, and they have formed and reformed, collided, reshaped themselves into larger galaxies, ever since.
These are the objects (and some of the processes) that I like to write about in this blog. Occasionally, I will stray into other topics, such as politics, or how you can view the sky, and that’s fine. As long as the subject is somehow related to astronomy, planetary science, space science — you get the idea — I write about it. It’s my blog, my rules. And, it’s my way of sharing (for free) the topics I learned about in graduate school with people who are also interested in those topics.
I don’t get a lot of comments from people who want to talk about those sciences. When I do, I allow them to be posted (I moderate comments). Mostly, though, I weed out crap from the comment feed. Most of the comments that get posted are not related to the subject, or they’re spam. Luckily, I moderate comments, and I have a good spam filter. So, all those half-literate, fake English spam comments that tell me that the writer is part of a collective that wants to start blogging and will I help, or tell me that my blog looks weird in some browser I’ve never heard of, or that post gibberish with a link to a pr0n site — those bots are wasting the sender’s time and money. They don’t get posted here.
What do I NOT write about? It’s easier to say what this blog isn’t. It’s NOT a public relations device. It’s not an instant “news” service where someone can send me a story and I’ll publish it unread. And, it’s not a place where they can send some fluffy press release that has nothing to do with the topics I DO write about and expect me to give free publicity. Same goes with half-baked, illogical conspiracy theories that the senders want me to use to “expose” the government, the Trilateral Commission, NASA, the medical profession, big pharma, big Farma, the Greys, the Pleiadeians, etc. etc.
Not gonna happen. I make a living as a writer talking about scientific exploration; so folks who expect me to be their free publicity machine should consider respecting my expertise and interests, rather than expecting a free ride.
I DO happily accept press releases each day from vetted sources that talk about recent discoveries in astronomy, space science, planetary science, astrobiology, related technologies, legitimate cosmology, and so forth. And, I use that information to do more research into the topics they discuss, and then create stories that share the cosmos (and our exploration of it) with my readers.
All that stuff I DO like to write about is the stuff of the cosmos. It teaches the wonders of the universe. It’s science at its purest, hardest, and most satisfying. What could be better than that?
