Blog 8: Culmination of the Course

Picture: Potentially viable planets visualization

ASTRO 2110 was my fourth astronomy class that I have taken here at Vanderbilt, and it was also one of my favorites. Astronomy is seen by many as interesting but irrelevant, so it was nice getting a deeper understanding of the most relevant parts of the universe to us by focusing on the Solar System. I enjoyed learning about planets and their moons in a more accurate and in-depth way than I did in middle and high school, and I feel much more well-versed in topics that are related to our Solar System.

My favorite topic that we discussed was looking at our discovery methods for other planets. I loved looking at the graphs of starlight over time, as it felt like a puzzle that I was solving to find the types of planets and the size of their orbit. Even though it was relatively simple, it was fun to think about the fact that it is not that much more complicated for scientists, they just have to collect the information that I just got from the graph.

Since I am minoring in Astronomy, I will be taking Astrophysics next semester. I am very excited to take some of the principles from this class and put them to mathematical use in that course. It will be very interesting to see similar topics in even more depth than what we did in this class.