Stellar Evolution
Clouds of gas and dust where stars are born.
Nebulae
The name of a process where mass transfers from one star to another.
Accretion.
An object so dense, not even light can escape it.
What is a Black Hole?
Launched on December 25, 2021, this telescope lives in the L2 Lagrange point and has already made exciting discoveries.
What is JWST?
Kepler made it. It says this: The orbit of a planet is an ellipse with one focus at the star.
What is Kepler's First Law?
This is what our sun will become after it dies.
What is a White Dwarf?
A kind of event that produced our first detection of gravitational waves.
What is a Black Hole Merger?
A supermassive black hole that's as bright as the rest of the galaxy.
What is a Quasar?
Launched in 1990, this telescope has made many discoveries. It orbits Earth and has a 2.4-meter mirror.
What is Hubble?
Star A has a higher surface temperature than Star B. Which star's light has a higher wavelength?
Star B
A star just moved right on an HR diagram. What just happened to it?
It got cooler!
When a white dwarf gains more mass than the Chandresakar limit and explodes.
What is a Type 1a Supernova?
A neutron star with sweeping beams of radiation.
What is a Pulsar?
This telescope only observes in X-rays!
Chandra X-Ray Observatory
Star A has an apparent magnitude of 5. Star B has an apparent magnitude of -1. Which appears brighter?
Star B
An object that's larger than a planet but isn't a star.
What is a Brown Dwarf?
When mass repeatedly accretes onto a white dwarf and explodes on its surface.
What is a Nova? (NOT a Type 1a Supernova)
A very small, very quickly spinning, very dense "dead star".
What is a Neutron Star?
This observatory is on the ground. It's specialized for detecting gravitational waves and uses lasers.
What is LIGO?
Planet Bob is orbiting the sun 4 AU away. What is the period of his orbit, in years?
8 years!
The life stage of the Sun between the Helium Flash and the Asymptotic Giant Branch.
What is the Horizontal Branch?
A violent event when two neutron stars merge.
What is a kilonova?
A highly magnetic pulsar.
What is a Magnetar?
This telescope, launched in 2004, made the first
observation of the explosion of a supernova. It studies gamma ray bursts. It's not the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope.
What is the Swift Observatory?
Imagine you got three times further away from the sun. (You're in the asteroid belt.) What happened to the apparent luminosity of the sun?
It got divided by 9.