Astronomy Books

Back in the day when I was a fledgling astronomer, one may call me an amateur or perhaps a student, I read my astronomy book like good little students should and answered all the questions on the online learning tool, “Mastering Astronomy.” After this class I felt like I had the world at my fingertips and like I knew everything there was to know about astronomy. I felt as though I could answer any astronomy question posed to me because I had studied very hard, proceeded to teach the subject, and even conducted some outside research. Ha. HAHA. How wrong I was.
Within the pages of astronomy textbooks are estimations, hypotheses, and theories. Every day a theory is formed or altered or even proved to be untrue. I was struck by this fact today as I read a story about how the Spitzer telescope was just recently able to determine how brown dwarfs are formed. For those of you that don’t know, a brown dwarf is (according to my textbook) similar to star except that it had too small of a mass to undergo nuclear fusion in its core and so it did not combust and thus was not able to fuse hydrogen into helium and so it is a celestial body that will cool for eternity (By the way, an awesome and VERY educational and useful site for learning the basics of astronomy is http://nasascience.nasa.gov/astrophysics/). I didn’t even think to research this topic because it seemed straightforward enough and I didn’t think to question scientists. Who would, they’re smart by definition and who am I to question such a guru (any scientist would scoff at this remark, by definition  ) Anyway, it turns out that nobody was actually sure about this theory because, although brown dwarfs are thought to be make up half of the stars in the galaxy, they are very hard to study and so the “facts” that I learned in astronomy about brown dwarfs were no such thing, but rather they were hypotheses.
In the case of brown dwarfs, the information that I gleamed from my textbook was right, and brown dwarfs do in fact formed like stars as the Spitzer saw in long-wavelength infrared. But I learned something today. Just because a “scientist” tells you something does not mean that he is right. And one should never assume that he is because this would be the end of the “scientist.”

Artist Rendition of a Brown Dwarf