Best Uses For Astronomy

One of the best ways to explain the uses for astronomy is to talk about what we've learned in the past from the study of astronomy. No one could doubt the uses for astronomy after a short study of all the facts and details about the world around us that have been gathered by astronomers and scientists of the past.

One of the past uses was to find out what makes up our galaxy. We discovered long ago, for example, that our world is made up of a variety of different objects, such as stars, planets, galaxies, asteroids, meteors, quasars, black holes and other celestial objects.

We learned also that there is more than one type of galaxy. Past discoveries of astronomy gathered photographs and views of various galaxy shapes - spirals, ellipses, and barred spiraling ones. The Milky Way is an example of the latter. Astronomy taught us that galaxies consist of dust, stars that exist in the billions as well as a variety of gases.

Astronomy has taught us that the various Solar systems contain two types of planets - terrestrial and Jovian. Terrestrial planets, those close enough to the sun to be influenced by it, are Mercury, Venus, our own earth and Mars. The Jovian planets, away from the sun and more heavily influenced by our galaxy's moon are Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto.

Past uses of astronomy taught us as well that star clusters fall into two categories too. There are star clusters that are open - with few stars far apart from each other. There are star clusters called globular, which contain many billions of stars that are relatively close to one another.