The Solar System
This planet rotates on its side relative to the plane of the solar system. How quirky!
What is Uranus?
This astronomer revolutionized how we understand the orbital mechanics of our solar system and pioneered the heliocentric model.
Who is Nicolaus Copernicus?
This red giant in the constellation Orion will be visible by day from Earth when it goes supernova.
What is Betelgeuse?
Unlike Hubble, the James Webb Space Telescope observes primarily in this type of light to see the early universe, the radiation from which minutely heats up its very cold sensors.
What is infrared light?
Named after an amateur astronomer, these reflecting telescopes are now commonplace due to their increased size from earlier Newtonian telescopes.
What is a Dobsonian telescope?
This planet is home to the Valles Marineris system, the largest canyon system in our solar system. The canyons measure about 10 times longer, 20 times wider, and 5 times deeper than the Grand Canyon.
What is Mars?
This astronomer’s work led to the discovery of radio pulsars in 1967. (She recently paid a visit to our campus!)
Who is Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell?
This feature of a star’s appearance is most likely to tell you something about its temperature.
What is color?
We can do ground-based astronomy successfully in this band of light because of atmospheric transparency.
What is visible light and/or radio waves?
The building we are currently in (the observatory!) is considered a national historic landmark due to the construction of this "one pixel camera" technology, which measures the brightness of stars.
What is a photovoltaic cell?
This icy moon of Jupiter has liquid water volcanoes on its frozen surface, and may even house life in its subsurface oceans.
What is Europa?
This astronomer’s work on general relativity led to a metric that describes the radius of a black hole.
Who is Karl Schwarzschild?
This process occurs in stellar cores, burning Hydrogen into Helium at temperatures of millions of degrees.
What is fusion?
We see this light from the early universe as a faint, extremely cold, microwave glow.
What is the cosmic microwave background?
The Sun emits enormous amounts of these tiny particles. Trillions of them are all around us right now, but we can only detect a few per day!
What are neutrinos?
This dwarf planet’s discovery led to the demotion of Pluto as a planet by the IAU in 2006.
What is Eris?
Famous for verifying Einstein’s theory of general relativity, this astronomer’s experiment measured the gravitational deflection of the Hyades star cluster in the 1919 total solar eclipse.
Who is Arthur Eddington?
This object is a subtype of neutron star that rotates rapidly and emits beams of radiation from its magnetic poles.
What is a pulsar?
Black hole accretion disks are a significant source of this powerful radiation.
What is gamma radiation?
Gravitational waves were first detected using this technique, which is also used in radio telescopes like the VLA and ALMA.
What is interferometry?
This moon of Mars is named for the Greek god of dread and terror.
What is Deimos?
After losing the bridge of his nose in a duel, this astronomer wore a prosthetic nose of silver and gold.
Who is Tycho Brahe?
The furthest known star, detected by JWST to be 28 billion light-years from Earth, is named after this character in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.
What is Earendel?
These short, bright bursts of radiation following a merger between neutron stars are thought to be the origin of many heavy metals in the universe.
What is a kilonova?
This term describes the hypothetical galaxy that will form when Andromeda and the Milky Way collide in about 5 billion years.
What is Milkomeda?