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The Balmer Thermometer
How hot would you say this star is? Take a wild guess. Well…sorry, but I’m going to stop you for a moment just to make sure we’re all using Kelvins. The Kelvin scale is like the Celsius scale, except water…
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Stars and Radiation
Stars are hot. Really hot. Hot enough to have energy to spare for their planets. If our star wasn’t hot, we couldn’t live on Earth. And our star isn’t even particularly hot for a star. It’s a middle-aged star of…
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Atoms and Radiation
Everything we know about space comes from radiation. Now wait just a moment here. That statement explains how astronomy is such a successful field of science — it’s based entirely on the information we can glean from radiation, after all.…
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How Atoms Work
Have you ever seen something like this? I’m going to venture a wild guess and say you haven’t, since scientists have only recently been able to take this kind of image. I learned about it in my biology class this…
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Types of Atoms
Does this look familiar? It might, or it might not. If it does, you might recognize it as the periodic table of the elements — more often known as simply the “periodic table.” It’s an ingenious way to organize elements…
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The Building Blocks of the Universe
“The Building Blocks of the Universe.” When you put it that way, atoms sound less like a topic specifically for a chemistry class and more like something astronomers might discuss. They really are. I’ve got a fantastic reason to include…
