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2022-04-14

Lecture 2: Astrophysics? Why bother?

#lecture

Intro

Good question! Science has at times spent quite a bit of money, material, brain cycles, and energy on exploration of the unknown. And we are not anywhere near understanding all of our home planet or ourselves, so why bother with space exploration at all? During my time at academia I gave a lot of tours of our little observatory to interested people. And of course this question was high on their list. In my opinion there are several puzzle pieces:

Puzzle Pieces

Space is a giant laboratory. It can easily establish conditions not achievable in lab conditions on Earth.

The bad news is, that we cannot travel there and take measurements. The good news is, that this keeps us out of trouble! All we know is derived from observations of electromagnetic waves of wavelengths spanning several orders of magnitude, and more recently from gravitational waves and particle streams.

I'm sure there is more.

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