Young Astronomers

Bigger than any number feels. If the Sun were a basketball, Earth would be a peppercorn 26 meters away, and the NEXT basketball (the nearest star) would be 7,000 kilometers away. And that’s just the first step: ride the scale of the universe →

Feet-first into a small one: gravity pulls your feet so much harder than your head that you’d stretch like spaghetti. Scientists honestly call it spaghettification. Into a giant one, you could cross the edge without feeling anything… but you could never, ever come back out. the full story →

Maybe someday, with a LOT of help. Mars has no air you can breathe, it’s colder than Antarctica, and you’d need a spacesuit outside forever. But it has water ice underground, and robots are there right now checking it out for us. visit Mars →

They don’t. Our air does. Starlight crosses trillions of kilometers in a perfectly straight line, then wobbles in the last 100 km as it passes through Earth’s moving air. Planets twinkle less because they’re little discs, not points. From space, nothing twinkles at all.

Really. The iron in your blood and the calcium in your bones were built inside stars that exploded before the Sun was born. The hydrogen in you is even older: it’s from the Big Bang itself. You are 13.8 billion years in the making. where atoms come from →

Nobody knows, and that’s the honest, exciting answer. We’ve found more than 6,000 planets around other stars, and some could have liquid water. But no alien life has ever been found, not even a microbe. You could be in the generation that finds out. the search for life →