What is a pulsar? A pulsar is a neutron star that rotates extremely rapidly and releases pulses of radiation, hence their name. Neutron stars are formed when stars much larger than our sun (a minimum of eight times larger) run out of fuel to burn. All stars begin by burning hydrogen and turning it into […]
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What is the Great Attractor? It is the theorized gravitational center of our Milky Way Galaxy and 100,000 other galaxies. The universe is expanding at a rate of 2.2 million km per hour. All galaxies should therefore be moving at that speed, but it turns out we are not. Our Milky Way Galaxy is moving
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Does the Oort cloud exist? Possibly, but there is no way of knowing. It is still just a working theory. The Oort cloud was first theorized by Jan Oort, a Dutch astronomer, in 1950. The idea is that a cloud of icy comets and planetesimals are orbiting the sun at a distance of about 0.03
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I learned this today. A dwarf galaxy is a galaxy with 1000 to a few billion stars. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, has between 200 and 400 billion stars. Dwarf galaxies tend to orbit larger galaxies. There are at least 14 satellite dwarf galaxies orbiting the Milky Way right now. They are the most
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I learned this today. A wormhole is a hypothetical tunnel that would connect two separate points in space. Wormholes are hypothetical and have obviously never been discovered. They were first theorized in 1916. Karl Schwarzschild, a German physicist and astronomer started looking into Einstein’s field equations. These are the equations that Einstein used in his
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I learned this today. Dark matter is a hypothetical matter in space that doesn’t absorb, emit or reflect light, yet has gravity and keeps the universe together. It is theorized that dark matter makes up 27% of the universe. The part that we can see, the ordinary matter, only makes up about 5%. If dark
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