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A "falling star" or a "shooting star" has nothing at all to do with a star! These amazing streaks of light you can sometimes see in the night sky are caused by tiny bits of dust and rock called meteoroids falling into the Earth's atmosphere and burning up. The short-lived trail of light the burning meteoroid produces is called a meteor.
A meteoroid is a piece of stony or metallic debris which travels in outer space. Meteoroids travel around the Sun in a variety of orbits and at various speeds. The fastest meteoroids move at about 42 kilometers per second. Most meteoroids are about the size of a pebble. When one of these pieces of debris enters the Earth's atmosphere, friction ...
Fireballs are really just big meteors - the result of meteoroids falling into the Earth's atmosphere and burning up. The rock that caused the "Chicago Fireball", as the March 2003 event has been called, was probably a small space rock about 1 or 2 meters wide. As it fell into the atmosphere, it heated up and eventually broke up into about 500 ...
Bethe won the 1967 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work concerning energy production in stars. Even More Details: Planet Earth, our bodies, and shining stars are all made of the same basic elements of matter. To understand why stars shine, we must first understand the tiny particles that make up matter. Scientists have studied matter in their ...
A meteoroid is a piece of stone-like or metal-like debris which travels in outer space. Most meteoroids are no bigger than a pebble. Large meteoroids are believed to come from the asteroid belt. Some of the smaller meteoroids may have come from the Moon or Mars. If a meteoroid falls into the Earth's atmosphere, it will begin to heat up and ...
Level 2. StarChild is a learning center for young astronomers ages 5-13 to learn about the solar system, the Milky Way galaxy, and the universe beyond. Use the links above to explore the site's topics. If you are looking for something a bit more advanced (ages 14+), then head on over to Imagine the Universe!
A theory that is attracting considerable attention states that gamma-ray bursts occur as the result of material shooting towards Earth at almost the speed of light as the result of a hypernova. A hypernova explosion can occur when the largest of the supermassive stars come to the end of their lives and collapse to form black holes. Hypernova ...
The sky slowly gets dark as the Moon moves in front of the Sun. When the Moon and Sun are in a perfect line, it is called a total eclipse. These are very rare. Most people only see one in their lifetime. As the Moon passes between the Sun and the Earth, the Moon begins to block out some of the Sun's light casting a shadow on the Earth.
The black holes may provide quasars with their energy. Quasars are so bright that they drown out the light from all other stars in the same galaxy. The word quasar is short for quasi-stellar radio source. Quasars give off radio waves, X-rays, gamma-rays, ultraviolet rays, and visible light. Most of them are larger than our solar system.
The dust in the coma reflects sunlight, and gas in the coma absorbs ultraviolet radiation and begins to glow. The comet starts to look like a big "fuzzy ball". This coma material is then blown away from the coma by the solar wind and becomes the comet's tail. Comet tails can stream out up to 100 million km in length!