Across
- 2. small rocky objects that orbit the sun, a famous group of these is called the kuiper belt.
- 6. Light, light that is beyond what is visible to the human eyes, usually measured in nanometers
- 7. highly favored by physical law and endlessly abundant in the universe
- 11. the star around which the earth orbits
- 12. a group of stars forming a recognizable pattern that is traditionally named after its apparent form or identified with a mythological figure
- 13. The study of the chemical composition of the universe’s matter and how the compositions were formed
- 14. stars made from neutrons that pulse radio waves for every rotation
- 17. an obscuring of the light from one celestial body by the passage of another between it and the observer or between it and its source of illumination
- 20. Giant, 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.
- 21. 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 system of millions or billions of stars, together with gas and dust, held together by gravitational attraction.
- 25. hole, a region of space having a gravitational field so intense that no matter or radiation can escape.
- 27. 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 _________
- 28. Bright _____ are great clouds of glowing gas, lit up by stars inside or nearby. Dark ______ are not lit up and are visible only because they block the light of stars behind them
- 29. connects two points in the universe also known as Einstein-Rosen bridges
Down
- 1. an artificial body placed in orbit around the earth or moon or another planet in order to collect information or for communication.
- 3. the curved path of a celestial object or spacecraft around a star, planet, or moon, especially a periodic elliptical revolution
- 4. Lensing, occurs when massive foreground objects bend and warp the fabric of space itself.
- 5. fastest known thing in the universe
- 8. plasma, plasma that is so hot that some or all its constituent atoms are split up into electrons and ions, which can move independently of each other in space
- 9. Eclipse, an eclipse in which the sun is obscured by the moon
- 10. a meteor that survives its passage through the earth's atmosphere such that part of it strikes the ground
- 15. explosive death of a star
- 16. galaxy, a galaxy undergoing an exceptionally high rate of star formation, as compared to the long-term average rate of star formation in the galaxy
- 18. the study and analysis of light using a spectrometer
- 19. Way, A broad, faintly glowing band stretching across the night sky, composed of billions of stars in our galaxy too faint to be seen individually. It’s invisible when the sky is lit up by artificial light or bright moonlight.
- 22. matter, the substance that makes up about 80% of our universe
- 24. heavy particles created from quarks grabbing partners
- 26. subatomic particles similar to electrons but have no electric charge and an extremely small mass