Question | Answer |
Constellation | patterns of stars in the sky |
Visible light | the light you see with your eyes |
Electromagnetism radiation | energy that can travel directly through space in the form of waves |
Wavelength | the distance between the crest of one wave and the crest of the next wave |
Spectrum | made up of the colors red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet |
Different waves the electromagnetic spectrum includes are… | infrared radiation, visible light, ultraviolet radiation, X-rays and gamma rays |
Refracting telescope | uses convex lenses to gather a large amount of light and focus it onto a small area |
Convex lens | a piece of transparent glass, curved so that the middle is thicker than the edges |
Reflecting telescope | Isaac Newton, a telescope that uses one or more mirrors to gather light; the mirror focuses a large amount of light onto a small area |
Radio telescopes | a device used to detect radio waves from objects in space; they have curved reflecting surfaces |
Observatory | a building that contains one or more telescopes most located on top of mountains or large hills |
Spectrograph | breaks the light from an object into colors and photographs the resulting spectrum |
Galaxy | the Milky Way is our galaxy, a giant flat surface that contains hundreds of billions of stars |
Universe | billions of galaxies, astronomers define it as all space and everything in it |
Light-year | is the distance that light travels in one year or about 9.5 million million kilometer |
Medium sized star | our sun |
Giant star | very large stars , much larger than the sun |
Apparent magnitude | is a star’s brightness as seen from Earth, it can be measured fairly easily using electronic devices |
Absolute magnitude | the brightness the star would have if it were at a standard distance from Earth, much more complicated to find a star’s absolute magnitude |
Hertzsprung-Russel diagram | H-R diagram shows the relationship between surface temperature and brightness |
Main sequence | a diagonal line in the H_R diagram that shows the sequence of surface temperature increase and brightness increases; 90% of the stars are main sequence stars |
Pulsars | a neutron star that produces radio waves |
Nebula | a large amount of gas and dust in space, spread out in an immense volume |
Protostar | in Greek Proto means “earliest”; is the earliest stage of a star’s life |
White draft | the remaining hot core of a star after its outer layers have expanded and drifted out into space |
Supernova | the explosion of a dying giant or supergiant star |
Neutron stars | a tiny star that remain after a supernova explosion |
Black Holes | the initial explosion that resulted in the formation and expansion of the universe |
Quasars | a distant galaxy with black hole at its center |
Binary stars | a star system that contains two stars |
Eclipsing binary | a star system in which one star periodically blocks the light from another |
Spiral galaxy | a galaxy that has the shape of twin spirals |
Elliptical galaxies | galaxies that look like flattened balls; these galaxies contain billion of stars but have little gas and dust between the stars |
Irregular galaxies | galaxies that do not have regular shapes; the Large Magellanic Cloud is an irregular galaxy |
Big Bang | the initial explosion that resulted in the formation and expansion of the universe |