You’re watching FreeSchool! It rises in the morning, giving light to the land below it. It sets in the evening, leaving the world in darkness. It even provides the heat and energy necessary for life to survive on Earth. You know what I’m talking about – the Sun! Because it is so important to us,… Read More »
The Solar System is the name we give to our local cosmic backyard. A better way to think of it is all the stuff held sway by the Sun’s gravity: The Sun itself, planets, moons, asteroids, comets, dust, and very thin gas. If you took a step back — well, a few trillion steps back… Read More »
Hey folks, Phil Plait here. In the last episode of Crash Course Astronomy, I talked about the eventual fate of the Sun, and other low mass stars like it. After a series of expansions and contractions, they blow off their outer layers, become white dwarfs, and fade away over billions of years. The end. Except… Read More »
Ok, so here’s some space 101 for you. You know what a planet is, right? You’re sitting on one at this moment in time. It’s Earth, your home. We are the third rock from the sun. The first is Mercury, ‘cos he’s closest to that energy giver, the Sun. Our family is called the Solar… Read More »
Mercury is the closest planet to the Sun. As you might expect, that makes it pretty hot. But also, it’s pretty cool. There are seven naked-eye solar system objects in the sky: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, the Sun, and the Moon. Seven. Each of them was associated with a god in ancient times. Mercury… Read More »
Earlier this month astronomers turned their telescopes on the heart of our galaxy, as they have done for years- yet tonight would be different. Invisible to any wavelength of light, a monster lurks at the very center of our Milky Way- the single most destructive force in the known universe. Spinning silently in space, a… Read More »
The sun is a star. That’s a profound statement, and one that’s not really all that obvious. Those little sparks in the night sky are pretty, but don’t look anything at all like the hot, blazing orb that lights up our days. It was a pretty remarkable intellectual leap to understand the Sun and the… Read More »
As has been famously said, space is the final frontier. The greatest of unknowns, space is far vaster than we can comprehend, and filled with phenomenon we barely understand. While we’ve been watching the heavens in awe for millenia, space exploration and discovery only began in earnest in the mid 20th century. Yet even what… Read More »