Welcome to a new series of posts that will characterize 1000 amazing facts about the Universe. There is so much out there that we have yet to learn, and every day, astronomers across the globe are using their research to reveal the deepest secrets of the cosmos. This series will look at the strangest, coolest, most exciting facts that we have discovered in hundreds of years of modern science. Fact #4: Most of the stars in the universe are red dwarfs smaller than our Sun. There is a leap of understanding that happens when a child learns that our Sun...
If you actually had the ability to see X-Rays, the world around you would look pretty boring. Actually it would be invisible, since nothing around you gives off X-rays. You might be able to see an imaging device if you live or work near a medical office, but that’s about it. If you looked at the night sky, you would see many interesting sources of X-Ray light, mostly from active black holes in our own galaxy and beyond. Recently a high-resolution scan of the Andromeda Galaxy revealed a plethora of sources, showing where black holes and neutron stars are feeding...
Nebula. Collapse. Protostar. Main Sequence. Red Giant. Planetary Nebula. White Dwarf. This is the cycle of life for a star like our Sun. By observing stars across the galaxy, we see snapshots of different points in a star’s life cycle. It’s the same with people; If you went for a walk in a city and observed people for a day, you would see every single stage of a person’s life: Infant, child, adolescent, youth, adult, middle aged, senior. How would you put them in order if you knew nothing about them? With people you might go up and ask them, but with stars we can...
The observations of our galaxy throughout history have told us that our Milky Way is roughly 100,000 light years across. A number confirmed time and time again by scientists with better and better instruments. But recently a team from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York, USA, published a paper challenged that idea, saying the galaxy is much bigger, up to 150,000 light years in diameter. They used the Sloan Digital Sky Survey’s (SDSS) data to look at the distribution of stars outward from the centre of the galaxy, in reference the the galactic plane. They discovered that the stellar distributions oscillated...
