College Astronomy

   I've recently taken a big step in my adult life and have decided to go back to college full-time. For the longest time, I was very anti-higher education. I believed that college was just a way to ease teens into working life, with some relevant skills outside of knowing how to put on a condom or change the oil on their 1989 Honda.


   I have since changed my mind after completing half a quarter of classes. This quarter, I'm taking Japanese, International Business and Astronomy.


   The latter is where this post comes in. Astronomy is pretty awesome. Check out this sweet planet-graph I came up with all on my own:

   I know you're grateful cause I'm dropping some hard-earned college knowledge on you right now for FREE. I had to pay for this class. I just want to cover a couple things that I thought were interesting.


Overall, the Universe is currently functioning on what (we think) is a normal, calm schedule. It didn't used to be (we think) so calm OR scheduled. Things exploded and other things imploded and hot gases turned into stars and shit smashed into each other to make planets and moons (we think).


   Our Sun is kind of a bloated guy. He's got some gassy issues, sometimes he burps & shit breaks all the way here on Earth. (Referencing my planet-graph, you can clearly see that we're very far from the sun & solar flares still reach us.) Crazy, I know.


   Pluto, omfg, Pluto IS NOT a planet anymore. Yes, I know this decision was made by brains sweeter than mine back in 2006 but what am I gonna do at the end of the song we learned about the order of the planets in grade school?

   Pluto is now classified as a "Kuiper belt object" (Pronounced KAH-ee-purr) & hangs out with a lot of ice and rocks smaller than "normal" planets. Don't tell Pluto, but there's actually a Kuiper belt object that's bigger than he is - Eris. I don't want to spoil anything, but I feel like there's gonna be a fight over who is the rightful 9th planet.


  There are A LOT of asteroids flying around our solar system! I mean, there's the asteroid belt that separates the inner planets from the outer, but there's also the Kuiper belt, the Oort cloud, and... What, what is this? The big thing right by Earth.
What in the everloving name of...

   Right now, (August 9th, 2011) there is an asteroid that is 1300' in diameter just "passing by". It's only 3.5 lunar distances away (lunar distance is the distance from the Earth to the Moon, duh.) The last time something this big flew by us was in 1976 and we had NO CLUE it was happening. Right now, Mars is like, "oh shit, hey guys, umm, there's something you should see..." This thing is angry that it's been flying around space forever and I'm sure it would love nothing more than to smash into something as nice as the Earth. (Although, NASA scientist brains are adamant that it will not have any affect on us.) 1300' across doesn't seem like that much, but really, if this thing smashed into us, we would die.


   So now, I'm contemplating how much freaking chaos is actually happening in our solar system at any given time daily. My brain is getting so much sweeter with this college education but I'm suddenly now aware of how many more ways I can die.
College education = anxiety.


But, I like it and my brain is getting bigger, so it's cool.