Front Range Community College reaches the community through the stars

On a chilly Thursday night, the courtyard behind Front Range Community College's (FRCC) classroom building was dark and still. But voices could be heard; behind a massive tree, a white dome hid, and in it, a group of students and community members learned about the stars.

"The college needs to be connected to the community," said Anthony Smith, an astronomy professor at FRCC, and host of that night's event. "That's why I'm really happy we're finally actually doing some PR and some outreach. I really like sharing science with the public."

Smith is a self-proclaimed "classic nerd," who has always been inspired to look upward. His interest in space brought him from small-town Missouri to Boulder, Colo. Here, he earned his masters degree and discovered an exoplanet, which is a planet orbiting a star other than our sun.

While the space race may not be at its height like in the 1960s and 1970s–in fact, the Voyager Missions Voyager Missions represent the only data available for Uranus and Neptune–the space community is continuing the research. As Smith told attendees, telescope technology is expanding and more than 5,000 planets around other stars have been discovered.

"We're steadily building a new generation of telescopes [in] a couple places around the world that are 30 meters wide. It'll let us see a whole bunch more," Smith said.

During the approximately hour-long event, Smith showed attendees planets and stars in constellations, which included Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus,the Orion nebula, the Pleiades, Alberio, Betelgeuse and others.

Rebecca Flerchinger, a student of Smith's who attended the event said, "I think it [astronomy events] opens the eye of the public to everything that's going on out of Earth. It also makes us appreciate Earth a lot more... [and] helped us with a lot of other sciences like health and geology."

Geology studies certainly seem to have been influenced by the investigations of the solar system's creation. Because of space investigations, it is now known that the inner planets are formed from various rocks while the outer planets are primarily made of gasses. We're also able to look into geological phenomena like volcanoes. Most of the inner, terrestrial planets have lost the majority of their volcanoes, with the exception of Earth, and to a lesser extent, Venus.

However, some of the outer planets' moons are still volcanic. Jupiter's Io is extremely volcanic, and Europa has volcanoes as well.

All planet's moons have themes: Jupiter's are named after the god's mythological partners; Saturn's are named after Titans; Uranus' are named after Shakespearean characters, and Neptune's are sea-themed. Unlike the Earth, Io has an elliptical orbit due to the gravitational pull from Jupiter and the other moons. Because of this gravitational force, friction is created, heating the planet and causing volcanic activity. Europa, in contrast, only had enough volcanic activity to melt a subsurface ocean beneath the moon's icy crust. "So," said Smith, "We might actually find big fish or space whales."

Titan, one of Saturn's moons, is unique, because it's the only other celestial body with a solid surface where it rains, and it also has a thick, nitrogen atmosphere like Earth. This is just some of why Smith loves studying Titan, which is "a bizarro Earth where all the liquids are solids and all the gases are liquids."

"Every time we learn something new about the universe through studying space, we learn something new about ourselves and our own home," said Bobby West, another FRCC astronomy student who attended the event. "If we really want to understand Earth, we absolutely have to understand planets and if we want to understand planets, we have to understand other ones."

Not only does studying space help us know where we came from, but it also may help in predicting what comes next. Scientists already know that our Sun drifted away from an open cluster like the Pleiades, and while Betelgeuse is massive compared to our sun, studying other stars' deaths gives us insight.

"Big stars are a 'live fast, die young' kind of star...For the smallest of the stars, the universe isn't old enough for any of them to have died yet," Smith said. "Stars are always a fight between the gravity that tries to hold them together and the fusion energy trying to escape the core."

Smith hosted another public stargazing night on Tuesday, Dec. 7. For more information about future events, @frccedu on Twitter has updates, and blog posts announcing the events can be found at: https://blog.frontrange.edu/