Tuesday, November 29, 2011
A Brief History of Time Chapter 3 Summary
In this chapter, Hawking begins by describing the night sky. Proxima Centauri, our nearest star, is 4 light years away. It would take a mere 8 light minutes to reach our sun, much less than Proxima Centauri. Knowing how separated our solar system is from the others is a kind of despairing thought, but we, as the curious minded humans that we are, carried on to discover more. Sir William Herschel would confirm the idea that all our stars are in a collection of stars that is now known as the Milky Way. But Hubble suggested the idea that our galaxy was not the only one and that there were many more galaxies in the universe out there. He decided that he must find a way to prove that there are many, many galaxies with little periods of space in between them. So he used the star's luminosity and distance to determine this. Eventually, he came up with a conclusion: Our universe is expanding.
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