The time I Met Astrophysics as a Friend. 

So.

'1,429,400,000 km away'. What does it mean?

Kudos to anyone who's got it already, it's the distance that Saturn is from the sun.

I got into astronomy and astrophysics in a bit of a weird way (at least I think it's kind of weird). I wasn't one of those 'Space is cool and Rockets are awesome!' children, in fact until I was about 13 space terrified me. All I could think about when I thought space was 'empty'. There is nothing there! It used to scare the hell out of me. How could there be Earth, and then the atmosphere, and then just nothing?! And then I would turn to the idea of how we could be the only living things in the universe and my mind would freak out even more and I'd panic and think Oh my god we are alone... 

So yeah, space and I weren't exactly childhood buddies. Then one day my brother was watching Brian Cox's 'Wonders of the Solar System' and I sat down next to him because I was kind of curious as to what this TV show was. It was then that space and I collided and boy did sparks fly. It might have been the dramatic music or the amazing footage from the Cassini Spacecraft or just the fact that I'm an emotional teenager, but as the TV screen showed a dramatic flyby of Saturn, its rings creating delicate shadows on the planet's surface, I fell in love.

So I watched the rest of the program and Brian Cox started talking about Enceladus, this tiny little moon (1/6.8th the size of our moon) which orbits in Saturn's E-ring. The incredible thing about this moon is that it is 1,429,400,000 km away from the sun and it has liquid water under its surface, and we first notice said liquid water when it was first spotted in a photograph from Cassini. A moon in our solar system way outside the 'goldilocks zone' (where water is liquid) and there are ice geysers on it!

I needed to know more. So I went on Wikipedia and got from Enceladus to Plank Time in about ten minutes (the way one does with Wiki) and was suddenly bombarding my Physics teacher with questions about viscosity and gravitational pull (much to her delight).

School broke up for summer as it tends to and I wanted to read a bit so I sent the Head of Physics an email asking for book recommendations and, I kid you not, while I was out one day he brought a massive stack of Astronomy and Astrophysics books to my house and gave them to my shocked little brother who had answered the door.

And from there I pretty much spent the summer reading and putting post-it notes in various Astronomy books only to have to give them back to the library before any of my post-it note questions could be answered.

And that is how my love affair with Astronomy and Astrophysics began!

So when I say '1,429,400,000 km away' I'm talking about the incredible distance away from the sun that liquid water exists. Because it's basically what set me off on my journey to boldly go where no one has gone before.