Nilore Vagan

It’s come to my attention that the general populace is frighteningly uneducated in the field of Astronomy. It seems that kids are still being told, when little, that all stars Super Nova and turn into black holes when they die. And then, when they get into middle and high school, they never take the optional Astronomy class, so they’re never told otherwise. And when they grow up to be adults, they start to talk know-it-all, only to be informed that they’ve been wrong this whole time, and it makes them feel silly.

WHY DO WE DO THESE THINGS TO OUR CHILDREN?!

Why do we feed our children easy-to-understand but highly inaccurate information when they’re young? It only messes them up. I mean, really. Books when I was a kid always showed planets in a perfectly circular orbit around the Sun because they didn’t want to go through explaining an elliptical orbit to a kid.

I remember going into an astronomy class and kids actually being disappointed when our star, and most others that we know of, will just expand, deplete their fuel, and then collapse into a dwarf star and drift around until it just goes cold and dies. They seemed even more disappointed when they found out that a lot of super novas don’t cause black holes – that they collapse into neutron stars. That only a small percentage of the known galaxy’s stars are massive enough to collapse into a black hole upon death.