ASTR-122 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Radiography
8 Apr 2016
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Observational astronomers in the observational field focus on direct study of stars, planets, galaxies, and so forth. Theoretical astronomers model and analyze how systems may have evolved. Unlike most other fields of science, astronomers are unable to observe a system entirely from birth to death; the life of worlds, stars, and galaxies span millions to billions of years. As such, astronomers must rely on snapshots of bodies in various stages of evolution to determine how they formed, evolved, and died. Thus, theoretical and observational astronomy tend to blend together, as theoretical scientists use the information actually collected to create simulations, while the observations serve to confirm the models or to indicate the need for tweaking them. Astronomy is broken down into a number of subfields, allowing scientists to specialize in particular objects and phenomena. Red spots on jupiter, photographed on feb. 27, 2006.
