AST 410 - Senior Thesis

Space is huge. Like, try holding out your arms as wide as you can. Space is even bigger than that! Crazy, right?

The universe has been around for almost 150 years. It was discovered by the ancient Greeks who enjoyed staring at the sky all day. Those who weren't blinded by staring at the sun all day were rewarded with a fantastic view of the stars, which was way cooler than the sun and less painful to look directly at. Scientists estimate that there are over a million trillion stars in the sky. Over a million BA-RILLION trillion! Dude, there are so many stars in the sky that if you tried to count them all you'd run out of fingers. Shit's insane.

I'm going to talk about all sorts of cool stuff in this thesis! I'm going to start by talking about the planets, and then the stars. If I have time I'll talk about galaxies. I don't know if I'll have time, though! LOL!

Note: For every hour I spent on my thesis I probably spent seven hours playing Hearts or Solitaire or Chess Titans. Fuck yeah.

SECTION 1: PLANETS

Figure 1. Venus, the 12th planet from our Sun

Planets are cool! You're standing on one right now, dude. I shit you not. Do you remember that one Magic School Bus where Ms. Frizzle took the class on a field trip through the solar system? I was going to use that book as one of my sources but then I realized that school buses don't really fly unless it was running on the Devil's Gasoline, but that's an issue for a different time. So instead I had to use "Baby's First Pop-Up Book: The Solar System" as a reference, but when I opened it up to Saturn one of the rings poked me in the eye. So I threw it in a fireplace.

Anyway, planets are the little dudes who constant orbit a star (the Bigger Dude). Some planets even have orbiting moons (the Littler Dudes). Some planets even have scary-ass aliens living on them. Those are the kinds of aliens who will act all friendly and shit at first but then stab you in the back later and dissolve your head or something! There are some cool aliens though, like Spock or the Grinch. Watch out for the bad ones!

Figure 2. Scary-ass alien

SECTION 2: STARS

"Well, I can put the trash into a landfill where's gonna stay for millions of years, or I can burn it up and get a nice smoky smell in here and let that smoke goes to the sky where it turns into stars." -- Charlie Kelly, Ph.D, Super-Astrophysicist from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia

Stars are cool! They are constantly getting orbited by Little Dudes and Littler Dudes. The sun is a star, didja know that? I bet you didn't, you fucker. WHO IS THE ASTROPHYSICIST, HERE? STEP OFF BRO.

Figure 3. The sun is like the Fonz, and he's so bright that he needs to shield his eyes from himself

Stars are constantly exploding all around us, too. They are like giant sticks of dynamite, dude. Once they explode they turn into even smaller stars called White Dwarfs. These stars are little bitches, they don't even produce energy anymore. And yet there's like a hundred quadrillion of them all over the place, all acting like drains on Space-Society. In that sense, compared to the other stars, white dwarfs are like the cast of Jersey Shore.

Figure 539. White Dwarfs

SECTION 3: GALAXIES

Whoops, out of time!


REFERENCES

-That damn pop-up book that has the planets with the sharp rings
-A Brief History of Space by Steven Hopkins
-Documentaries narrated by Morgan Freeman
-This other thesis I found that I copied stuff from word for word
-That old dude who begs for change outside of Kroger
-Episodes of that old Nickelodeon show Space Cases
-The back of a ketchup bottle
-That Zelda game where the moon slowly comes crashing down
-MosDef's Twitter page
-A Magic 8-Ball
-The voices in my head, but only the ones that talk about space