Introductions

Hello, I'm Jonathan, a current sophomore at the Caltech Institute of Technology in Professor' Johnson's AY 20 class (Basic Astronomy and the Galaxy). This will be my blog containing homework, pictures, facts, and overall cool stuff about space (and stuff).

This is a panoramic view of the near-infrared sky, showing locations of several objects in space. The long blue line in the bottom right shows the location of the Great Attractor, a location in intergalactic space with the mass of tens of thousands of Milky Ways. Tens of thousands of galaxies, our own included, are hurtling towards the Great Attractor at over 14 million miles an hour! In 1987, a team at Caltech discovered this motion of the Milky Way, and hypothesized that there must exist a very massive object at the location of the so-called Great Attractor. Because it lies behind the plane of our own galaxy, dust and stars from the Milky Way obscure our view of the Great Attractor, making it difficult to determine what it exactly is.

Why is astronomy cool? Because of awesome names like "The Great Attractor." I'm looking forward to the rest of this class so much.