astronomy

8 articles · All tags

• Solar Eclipses: How They Work and Why Totality Is Rare
  A solar eclipse happens when the Moon passes between Earth and the Sun. Learn the types, why totality is rare, the Saros cycle, and how to watch one safely.
• Gravitational Waves: Ripples in Spacetime Explained
  Gravitational waves are ripples in spacetime from accelerating masses. LIGO first detected them in 2015 from two merging black holes 1.3 billion light-years away.
• Exoplanets
  Exoplanets explained: how astronomers find worlds around other stars, the strange planet types found so far, and the search for habitable Earth-like planets.
• The Antikythera Mechanism
  A geared bronze astronomical calculator from ancient Greece, recovered from a shipwreck in 1901 — the most complex mechanical device to survive antiquity.
• White Dwarfs
  The dense, cooling remnants of Sun-like stars supported by electron degeneracy pressure, with a maximum mass of about 1.4 solar masses.
• Kepler's Laws of Planetary Motion
  The three empirical laws describing planetary orbits: ellipses, equal areas in equal times, and the relation between period and orbit size.
• Black Holes
  Regions of spacetime where gravity is so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape from inside the event horizon.
• Stellar Nucleosynthesis
  How stars build chemical elements from hydrogen through nuclear fusion, and how explosions and stellar winds spread them into space.