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...
Time is a very slow thing when we talk about the universe. Stars can live for many Billions of years, and over human timescales they seem stagnant and unchanging. So it’s no surprise that when we look at distant galaxies, they don’t appear to change at all over the course of centuries. But appearances can be deceiving. Galaxies do change, more quickly than you would imagine. M87, pictured above, is a monstrous Galaxy of nearly 1 Trillion stars, more than twice as populous as the Milky Way. It looks like a big fuzzy star, and it quite regular in appearance...
