Cool Astronomy Topics

The moon is Earth's only natural satellite and the only astronomical body other than Earth ever visited by us humans. The moon is the brightest object in the night sky but gives off no light of its own. Instead, it reflects light from the sun and Earth and the rest of the solar system. The moon is about 4.6 billion years old. The same as Earth! The moon is much smaller than Earth though.

Dark Matter- When the universe was young, it was smooth and had hardly any features. As it grew, it developed more things and became more organized. Our solar system is very organized with planets. Stars collect themselves into galaxies. Our sun is an average star in our galaxy and it is called a milky way. The Milky Way contains about 100 billion stars. That is 100,000,000,000 stars! It turns out there is five times more material in clusters of galaxies than we would expect from the galaxies and hot gas we can see. Most of the stuff in clusters of galaxies is invisible and, since these are the largest structures in the Universe held together by gravity, scientists then conclude that most of the matter in the entire Universe is invisible. This invisible is dark matter.

Apollo Mission- The Apollo program was designed to land humans on the Moon and bring them safely back to Earth. Six of these missions were successfully achieved and completed there goals, which were: 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, and 17. Apollos 7 and 9 were Earth orbiting missions to test the Command and Lunar Modules, but did not return lunar data. Apollos 8 and 10 tested various components while orbiting the Moon, and returned photography of the lunar surface. Apollo 1 and 13 did not land on the moon because of the malfunction in their engines.

Binary stars- is a misnomer because it is a star system made up of most of the time two stars that orbit around one center of mass and the mass is concentrated mainly. Don't confuse it with two stars that appear close together, but in real life they are very far apart. About 8 percent of the stars are visible to us and those star are visual binary stars. Scientists believe that about half of these stars in the sky are part of binaries. The only way that we can figure out the masses of stars is to study the orbital motions of binary stars!

Black Holes- With black holes, the more things that goes inside of them, the smaller it gets. While that happens, it gets more dense. It's force can prevent any light and from letting anything escape from it. Black holes do exists today. Scientists know how they were created, where they are, and why they appear in different sizes. Scientists even know what would happen if anyone was to fall into one. We don't have to worry about any treats to Earth because black holes are light years away.