Across
- 1. a system of millions or billions of stars, together with gas and dust, held together by gravitational attraction.
- 2. a “dirty snowball” of ice and rocky debris, typically a few miles across, that orbits the Sun in a long ellipse. When close to the Sun, the warmth evaporates the ice in the nucleus to form a coma (cloud of gas) and a tail; a famous version of this is Halley’s ____
- 3. explosive death of a star
- 7. the curved path of a celestial object or spacecraft around a star, planet, or moon, especially a periodic elliptical revolution (i.e the Earth and the Sun)
- 8. light that is beyond what is visible to the human eyes, usually measured in nanometers
- 9. heavy particles created from quarks grabbing partners(greek root hadros which means “thick”)
- 14. a group of stars forming a recognizable pattern that is traditionally named after its apparent form or identified with a mythological figure
- 15. spectroscopy is the study and analysis of light using a spectrometer
- 17. connects two points in the universe also known as Einstein-Rosen bridges
- 18. the substance that makes up about 80% of our universe
- 20. small rocky objects that orbit the sun, a famous group of these is called the kuiper belt.
- 22. a unit of astronomical distance equivalent to the distance that light travels in one year, which is 9.4607 × 1012 km (nearly 6 trillion miles)
- 23. a meteor that survives its passage through the earth's atmosphere such that part of it strikes the ground
- 24. pulsars are stars made from neutrons that pulse radio waves for every rotation
- 27. Bright _____ are great clouds of glowing gas, lit up by stars inside or nearby. Dark nebulas are not lit up and are visible only because they block the light of stars behind them
- 28. a very large star of high luminosity and low surface temperature. Red giants are thought to be in a late stage of evolution when no hydrogen remains in the core to fuel nuclear fusion.
Down
- 1. gravitational lensing occurs when massive foreground objects bend and warp the fabric of space itself.
- 4. a complete or partial hiding of the sun caused by the moon's passing between the sun and the earth
- 5. neutrinos are subatomic particles similar to electrons but have no electric charge and an extremely small mass
- 6. an eclipse in which the sun is obscured by the moon
- 10. A broad, faintly glowing band stretching across the night sky, composed of billions of stars in our galaxy too faint to be seen individually (also is a candy bar)
- 11. a region of space having a gravitational field so intense that no matter or radiation can escape.
- 12. cosmochemistry is the study of the chemical composition of the universe’s matter and how the compositions were formed
- 13. fastest known thing in the universe
- 16. a starburst galaxy undergoes an exceptionally high rate of star formation
- 19. plasma in space that is so hot that some or all its constituent atoms are split up into electrons and ions
- 21. the star around which the earth orbits
- 25. highly favored by physical law and endlessly abundant in the universe
- 26. an artificial body placed in orbit around the earth or moon or another planet in order to collect information or for communication.