Emma
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How Far Are the Stars?
Stars don’t look small because they’re really the size of pinholes in a blanket. The smallest are the size of Earth. The largest have 128,865,170 times Earth’s diameter. They look small in the sky because they’re distant. It’s for the same…
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Star Luminosity Classes
What do you think it would mean for a star to be in a specific luminosity class? I mean…does that mean they go to school to learn how to be bright? (Ha, ha…yeah, I know, bad astronomy pun.) Well…not quite.…
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Just How Big Are Stars?
Tell me about the stars you see in this image. They look like billions of little pinpricks of light, right? It’s hard to imagine that each one of these is probably the size of the sun…or much larger. And the…
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The H-R Diagram
There are 250 billion stars in our galaxy alone. Many are much like the sun, labeled with the Latin sol for “sun” in this diagram. But many more are not quite what we might expect stars to be like, after living…
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How Lightning Strikes
There’s a saying that “lightning strikes whatever’s tallest.” But this is only partly true. Tall objects do attract lightning bolts, but there’s a second condition for lightning to strike: electrical conductivity. Meaning, a lightning bolt will only strike an object…
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The Starlight We Can’t See
Find yourself a dark, unpolluted night sky on a clear night free of clouds, and you are very likely to look up into the heavens and see a sight quite like this. It’s what we see of the Milky Way,…
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What Causes the Lunar Phases?
We see it almost every night of our lives. For thousands of years, the greatest philosophers and astronomers alike have watched its face change and wondered why. Step outside and observe the moon every day for a month and you…
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Life vs. Rocks: What Makes Them Different?
Welcome to my third “Science Answers” post! About a month ago, I sent out a post requesting science questions from all of you; you can find it here. This post addresses the third of the questions I was asked. If you…
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What is Gravity, Anyway?
Q: What is gravity? (asked by Simon) Wow…great question. This is a question the greatest scientific minds have asked and tried to answer for centuries. It’s a question not even Stephen Hawking, the scientific genius of the century, has fully…
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The Secrets of Magnets
Welcome to my first “Science Answers” post! About a month ago, I sent out a post requesting science questions from all of you; you can find it here. This post addresses the first of the questions I was asked. If you…
