Astonomy

3. A supermassive black hole gorging on gas at the center of a distant galaxy.
4. A broad, faintly glowing band stretching across the night sky, composed of billions of stars in our galaxy too faint to be seen individually.
5. The distance that light (moving at about 186,000 miles per second) travels in one year, or about 6 trillion miles.
9. When an object moves in the reverse sense of “normal” motion.
11. A concentration of mass so dense that nothing — not even light — can escape its gravitational pull once swallowed up.
12. A star ending its life in a huge explosion. In comparison, a nova is a star that explosively sheds its outer layers without destroying itself.

1. A distinctive pattern of stars used informally to organize a part of the sky.
2. A vast collection of stars, gas, and dust, typically 10,000 to 100,000 light-years in diameter and containing billions of stars
4. A brief streak of light caused by a small piece of solid matter entering Earth’s atmosphere at tremendous speed (typically 20 to 40 miles per second).
6. is a “dirty snowball” of ice and rocky debris, typically a few miles across, that orbits the Sun in a long ellipse.
7. Latin for “cloud.”
8. A massive ball of gas that generates prodigious amounts of energy (including light) from nuclear fusion in its hot, dense core.
10. An event that occurs when the shadow of a planet or moon falls upon a second body.
13. A solid body orbiting the Sun that consists of metal and rock.