Astrophysics for People in a Hurry

gaseous spheres called stars. But if a star finds itself orbiting too close to another object whose gravity ...

one percent—about twenty-six miles. But Earth is small, mostly solid, and doesn’t rotate all that fast. At ...

insight. Some are raggedy. Others are stretched thin in filaments. Yet others form vast sheets. None ...

multiple ships at sea, far enough away from one another so that their circular horizons do ...

9. Invisible Light And therefore as a stranger give it welcome. There are more things in heaven and earth, ...

temperature throughout the experiment. But that’s not what happened. The temperature of his control the ...

duly been named the hertz. Mysteriously, astrophysicists were a bit slow to make the connection between t ...

multi-band image. That’s precisely what Geordi from the television series Star Trek: The Next Generation see ...

Extraterrestrial Origin.”††††† With that observation, radio astronomy was born—but minus Jansky himself. B ...

six antennas of ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter Array, in the remote Andes Mountains of northern Chile. Tu ...

In 1994, NASA’s Compton Gamma Ray Observatory detected something as unexpected as the Velas’ discoveries: frequ ...

††† Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, letter to the Royal Society of London, October 10, 1676. †††† All waves follow the si ...

10. Between the Planets From a distance, our solar system looks empty. If you enclosed it within a sphere — ...

coalesced to form our lovely, low-density satellite. Apart from this newsworthy event, the period of heavy b ...

Sun for billions more years. As is true for the asteroid belt, some objects of the Kuiper belt travel ...

face to its host planet. Jupiter’s system of moons is replete with oddballs. Io, Jupiter’s closest moon, is ...

Earth’s atmosphere is commonly described as extending dozens of miles above Earth’s surface. Satellites in “ ...

asteroids have familiar names such as Jody, Harriet, and Thomas. There are even asteroids out there nam ...

11. Exoplanet Earth Whether you prefer to sprint, swim, walk, or crawl from one place to another on Earth, yo ...

ice floes in the North Atlantic, and volcanic eruptions wherever they occur. From the Moon, a quarter m ...