Across
- 3. A star ending its life in a huge explosion
- 5. A concentration of mass so dense that nothing — not even light — can escape its gravitational pull once swallowed up. Many galaxies (including ours) have supermassive black holes at their centers.
- 6. a “dirty snowball” of ice and rocky debris, typically a few miles across, that orbits the Sun in a long ellipse
- 9. A massive ball of gas that generates prodigious amounts of energy
- 10. A solid body orbiting the Sun that consists of metal and rock
- 11. vast collection of stars, gas, and dust, typically 10,000 to 100,000 light-years in diameter and containing billions of stars
Down
- 1. A supermassive black hole gorging on gas at the center of a distant galaxy
- 2. Two stars that lie very close to, and are often orbiting, each other
- 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
- 7. a brief streak of light caused by a small piece of solid matter entering Earth’s atmosphere at tremendous speed
- 8. glowing gas lit up by stars inside or nearby