Category: Education
Gravitational Waves: How LIGO Opened a New Window on the Universe
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Gravitational waves are ripples in the fabric of spacetime itself, predicted by Einstein in 1916 and finally detected a century later. Photo: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center (Public Domain) Ripples in the Fabric of Spacetime On September 14, 2015, at 5:51 AM Eastern Time, both detectors of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave…
The Milky Way: Understanding and Observing Our Home Galaxy
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The Milky Way is our cosmic home, a barred spiral galaxy containing hundreds of billions of stars, stretching 100,000 light-years across. Photo: Hristo Fidanov / Pexels Our Address in the Cosmos On a clear, moonless night from a truly dark location, you can see it: a soft, luminous band stretching…
Comets: Visitors from the Edge of the Solar System and How to Observe Them
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Comets have captivated humanity for millennia, their glowing tails stretching across the night sky as they sweep through the inner solar system. Learn more in our guide to solar observing. Photo: Alex Andrews / Pexels Cosmic Snowballs with Spectacular Tails Throughout human history, comets have inspired awe, fear, and fascination.…
The Life Cycle of Stars: From Stellar Nurseries to Supernovae and Beyond
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Stars are born in vast clouds of gas and dust, living out their lives through predictable stages determined entirely by their mass. Photo: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center (Public Domain) Every Star Has a Story Look up at the night sky and you are seeing stars at every stage of their…
Star Clusters: The Difference Between Open and Globular Clusters
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Cosmic Families Most stars in the galaxy are not loners like our Sun. They form in groups—clusters of stars born together from the same cloud of gas and dust. These stellar families drift through space together, bound by gravity, sharing a common origin and fate. For amateur astronomers, star clusters…
Finding Dark Skies: How to Escape Light Pollution and Reclaim the Stars
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The Lost Sky There was a time when every human being on Earth could look up on a clear night and see the Milky Way—a luminous river of stars arching across the sky. Our ancestors navigated by the stars, told stories about the constellations, and lived under a sky that…
