Comets and the Oort Cloud
We say the solar system is made of the Sun and 8 planets, but there’s so much more to it than that. Billions of objects and billions of kilometres, it’s unbelievably large. Tanno and Iguda visited this comet when it…
Category: Deep Space
Alpha Centauri’s stars
When Tanno and Iguda visited the Alpha Centauri binary star system, they also stopped in at Proxima Centauri. That’s a red dwarf star, the nearest star to Earth. And we recently discovered it has an Earth-like planet orbiting it. What…
Exoplanets
Exoplanets are planets outside our solar system. The first one was confirmed in 1995 and since then we’ve discovered over 5000 more. Tanno and Iguda visited the Trappist system. This has seven exoplanets really close to their star. If you…
Betelgeuse
The red supergiant Betelgeuse is a star that is following a very different life path from our Sun. In this photograph taken using infrared light, Betelgeuse shows up as the bright blue spot in the corner of the picture. The…
Blue Ring Nebula
The Blue Ring Nebula is actually two cones of debris moving out from a collision between two stars. The Blue Ring Nebula was discovered by NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer mission (GALEX). The astronomers think that a star similar to our…
Neutron stars
The Crab Nebula was a supernova which left behind a neutron star. You can see here that the postcard image was made from five separate images overlaid onto each other. Just beautiful! Here’s the story of why a star goes…
Supernovas
Supernovas are amazing! They are the most enormous explosions humans have ever seen. Sometimes bright enough to be visible as stars in the daytime. Most of the dots in this picture of galaxy NGC2441 are groups of stars. The one…
Dark Matter
Dark Matter makes up about 25% of the Universe, but we can’t see it or feel it (or hear it or anything it!) We can only tell it’s there by its effect on other things due to its gravity. And…