Name: Alex Nguyen

Lecture Title: Myths of Astronomy

Name of Presenter: Dr. Thomas Targett

Date: May 11, 2023

Summary of Presentation:

The overall purpose of this presentation was most common knowledge that the

general public knows about astronomy turns out to be myths. Some agreed norms of

astronomy such as the sun being a yellow or an orange turns out to be untrue. The sun

is actually the color white, most people do not know this because it turns out that these

myths are being pushed out to people from film industries such as Hollywood which

puts entertainment as a priority rather than the truth. Another common myth that is

misunderstood is that asteroid fields are extremely dangerous, every single asteroid in

the Mars belt has around 100,000 cubic miles to itself. The odds of hitting an asteroid

are one in a billion! You would have to intentionally direct a ship into an asteroid for you

to crash into one of them, so movies like StarWars showing ships soaring through an

asteroid belt and dodging the many asteroids are probably false.

One of the more generalized myths is that explosions can occur in space. A

bomb on Earth where there is oxygen allows the molecules to collide into each other

which causes an explosion. In outer space however, there is no oxygen which means

no molecules to collide into each other which means no explosion. On July 25, 1976 a

photo of a face-like structure was discovered on Mars. Later a clearer photo of this face

was discovered and it showed that this face was just a clump of rock and had barely

any resemblance to a face in the clearer photo. The phenomenon called “pareidolia”, is
caused because the human mind is programmed to seek out other human faces on

other objects.

Reflection:

The presentation on Myths of Astronomy was interesting because most people

agree on the usual norm such as the sun being yellow and meteorites being hot are

actually false, and it turns out to be completely false. It is very cool to know that this

information is barely known to most of the world and that most people will never know

that the sun isn’t actually yellow. It is especially interesting to know that even though this

information is available to the public, most people’s knowledge of these subjects are

based off of the movies they see that are produced by Hollywood and other filmmakers

that push out these movies.

Current Article: Star identities, star births and more revealed with Milky Way

portrait

By: Tribune Content Agency

0.26.14

Astronomers can now have a glimpse of new information in space. Astronomers

look up into the sky with infrared light which cuts through the many clouds of interstellar

dust that have previously blocked them before. This new view has given the

astronomers much more new information that previously were invisible using visible

light before. The new images taken using infrared light have increased the content that

the Milky Way had before, an astonishing 200 million new stars were added to the

catalog of the Milky Way. This was GLIMPSE360, the new Milky Way portrait. Scientists

are now able to clearly see the overall structure of the Milky Way and now being able to
see how many spiral arms the Milky Way has. This has increased the growth of

knowledge over the years because for the first time Astronomers can use stars to

measure the size rather than using gas.