Planets
These types of exoplanets are easiest to observe.
What are hot Jupiters?
This explosive event marks the death of star, leaving behind a compact object such as a neutron star or black hole.
What is a supernova?
What is a spiral galaxy?
Our Universe is primarily composed of these two elements.
What are Hydrogen and Helium?
This object can disperse light, allowing us to see the individual colors that make up one source.
What is a prism/diffraction grating?
This method for detecting exoplanets measures the slight dimming of a star's light as a planet passes in front of it.
What is the transit method?
A hotter star like a blue giant emits more light at shorter wavelengths, while a cooler star like a red dwarf emits more at longer wavelengths. This color-temperature relationship is a hallmark of this type of radiation.
What is blackbody radiation?
Galaxies are surrounded by a halo of this material.
What is dark matter?
Dark matter was first discovered by measuring the rotational velocity of stars within our galaxy. These days, we can probe dark matter around other galaxies using this technique.
What is gravitational lensing?
Spectral lines result from this particle transitioning between different orbitals around an atom's nucleus.
What is an electron?
This current space telescope, launched in 2021, uses infrared observations to study exoplanet atmospheres in unprecedented detail.
What is the James Webb Space Telescope?
A star like the Sun will expand into this type of star after it stops fusing hydrogen.
What is a red giant?
This process is believed to dampen or fulling stop star formation in galaxies.
What is feedback?
According to current estimates, roughly 68% of our Universe is made up of this mysterious quantity.
What is dark energy?
Astronomers use the strength of these features in a spectrum — dark or bright lines at specific wavelengths — to determine which elements a star or nebula is made of and in what amounts.
What are spectral lines?
This detection method looks for a star 'wobbling' back and forth, caused by the gravitational tug of an orbiting planet, and is detected through shifts in the star's spectral lines.
What is the radial velocity method / Doppler spectroscopy?
Because element actually requires more energy than its fusion releases, its buildup in a massive star's core signals the end of stellar fusion and can trigger a core-collapse supernova.
What is iron?
What are galaxy mergers?
Doppler shift refers to the stretching or compressing of light's wavelength due to its relative motion to the observer. This term describes the stretching of light's wavelength due to cosmic expansion.
What is redshift?
As liquid nitrogen rapidly vaporizes and expands inside the sealed bottle, gas shoots out one direction through the nozzle, and this law explains why the bottle rockets off in the opposite direction.
What is Newton's third law of motion?
This is the name for the first confirmed exoplanet discovered orbiting a Sun-like star, found in 1995.
What is Pegasus 51b?
This type of stellar transients have pulses that change their brightness in a predictable manner.
What are cepheids?
This term refers to an extremely bright, compact region at the center of some galaxies, powered by a feeding supermassive black hole, that can outshine the entire rest of the galaxy.
What is an active galactic nucleus (AGN)/active black hole?
This theoretical period of extremely rapid, exponential expansion is thought to have occurred in the first fraction of a second after the Big Bang.
In 2019, astronomers released the first-ever direct image of one of these objects, located at the center of the galaxy M87, using a global network of telescopes called the Event Horizon Telescope and a technique called interferometry.
What is a supermassive black hole?