Astronomy Archives
People say this man invented the telescope, but all he did was point it up towards the sky.
Who is Galileo?
These tiny blemishes on the photosphere of the Sun regularly appear and disappear every few years.
What are sunspots?
What is the dark side of the Moon?
This term is used to represent a planet's furthest point from its central star.
What is aphelion?
This planet got knocked on its side, so you making jokes about its name is honestly pretty insensitive.
What is Uranus?
This astronomer supports both geocentrism and is also an astrologer... so he was pretty wrong on both counts.
Who is Ptolemy?
This zone of the Sun's internal structure is where deuterium and tritium fuse to create helium and lots of light.
What is the radiative zone?
It causes galaxies to spin faster than we expect... but try as we might we just cannot find it!
What is dark matter?
This outermost edge of the solar system is home to many tiny, icy worlds.
What is the Kuiper Belt?
Mercury's year might be just two of its days, but this planet's year is less than even one of its days!
What is Venus?
Even ancient astronomers knew the Earth was round, thanks to this philosopher / scientist.
Who is Aristotle?
Once the Sun expands, its outer layers are shed into these hydrogen-dense "clouds".
What is a nebula?
The dark patches on the Moon are theorized to have been caused by this, early in the Moon's history.
What is volcanism?
It seems like the universal neighborhood is receding away from us... evidenced by this phenomenon when observing stars.
What is redshift?
This planet is the best at doing convection thanks to its internal heat - which makes it very windy there!
What is Neptune?
While Kepler is the one who came up with the laws of planetary motion, this astronomer set the stage... and got drunk at a few parties on the way.
Who is Brahe?
Because the Sun isn't very massive, it'll approach the end of its life as one of these super-hot, dense core remnants.
What is a white dwarf?
The universe is expanding at a rapid rate, and though we know why, we don't even know what that is, really.
What is dark energy?
This sphere that represents the outer bounds of a galaxy's influence spans hundreds of thousands of light years alone.
With more mass, this planet could have been a star. But it'll have to settle with being 0.1% of the solar system's mass instead.
What is Jupiter?
Thanks to the help of Egyptian scholars, this man used shadows to determine the curvature of the Earth.
Who is Eratosthenes?
The inside of the Sun is made up mostly of free-flowing hydrogen nuclei and loose electrons, which collectively is called this.
What is plasma?
This represents the furthest edges of the universe that we can see; beyond it, there is nothing but darkness.
What is the cosmic microwave background?
This appropriately-named star is a mere 4 light years away from us - that may be 23.5 trillion miles, but it's still our closest neighbor.
What is Proxima Centauri?
This planet hasn't even completed a full orbit since its discovery in 1930... hey, wait a second!
What is Pluto?