Universe

What is the universe?

The universe is everything. It includes all of space, and all the matter
and energy that space contains. It even includes time itself and, of
course, it includes you.

Earth and the Moon are part of the universe, as are the other planets and their many
dozens of moons. Along with asteroids and comets, the planets orbit the Sun. The Sun is
one among hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way galaxy, and most of those stars
have their own planets, known as exoplanets.

The Milky Way is but one of billions of galaxies in the observable universe — all of them,
including our own, are thought to have supermassive black holes at their centers. All the
stars in all the galaxies and all the other stuff that astronomers can’t even observe are all
part of the universe. It is, simply, everything.

Though the universe may seem a strange place, it is not a distant one. Wherever you are
right now, outer space is only 62 miles (100 kilometers) away. Day or night, whether you’re
indoors or outdoors, asleep, eating lunch or dozing off in class, outer space is just a few
dozen miles above your head. It’s below you too. About 8,000 miles (12,800 kilometers)
below your feet — on the opposite side of Earth — lurks the unforgiving vacuum and
radiation of outer space.

In fact, you’re technically in space right now. Humans say “out in space” as if it’s there and
we’re here, as if Earth is separate from the rest of the universe. But Earth is a planet, and
it’s in space and part of the universe just like the other planets. It just so happens that things
live here and the environment near the surface of this particular planet is hospitable for life
as we know it. Earth is a tiny, fragile exception in the cosmos. For humans and the other
things living on our planet, practically the entire cosmos is a hostile and merciless
environment.
How old is Earth?
Our planet, Earth, is an oasis not only in space, but in time. It may feel permanent, but the
entire planet is a fleeting thing in the lifespan of the universe. For nearly two-thirds of the
time since the universe began, Earth did not even exist. Nor will it last forever in its current
state. Several billion years from now, the Sun will expand, swallowing Mercury and Venus,
and filling Earth’s sky. It might even expand large enough to swallow Earth itself. It’s difficult
to be certain. After all, humans have only just begun deciphering the cosmos.

While the distant future is difficult to accurately predict, the distant past is slightly less so. By
studying the radioactive decay of isotopes on Earth and in asteroids, scientists have learned
that our planet and the solar system formed around 4.6 billion years ago.

How old is the universe?

The universe, on the other hand, appears to be about 13.8 billion years old. Scientists
arrived at that number by measuring the ages of the oldest stars and the rate at which the
universe expands. They also measured the expansion by observing the Doppler shift in light
from galaxies, almost all of which are traveling away from us and from each other. The
farther the galaxies are, the faster they’re traveling away. One might expect gravity to slow
the galaxies’ motion from one another, but instead they’re speeding up and scientists don’t
know why. In the distant future, the galaxies will be so far away that their light will not be
visible from Earth.

Put another way, the matter, energy and everything in the universe (including space itself)
was more compact last Saturday than it is today. The same can be said about any time in
the past — last year, a million years ago, a billion years ago. But the past doesn’t go on
forever.

By measuring the speed of galaxies and their distances from us, scientists have found that
if we could go back far enough, before galaxies formed or stars began fusing hydrogen into
helium, things were so close together and hot that atoms couldn’t form and photons had
nowhere to go. A bit farther back in time, everything was in the same spot. Or really the
entire universe (not just the matter in it) was one spot.

Don't spend too much time considering a mission to visit the spot where the universe was
born, though, as a person cannot visit the place where the Big Bang happened. It's not that
the universe was a dark, empty space and an explosion happened in it from which all matter
sprang forth. The universe didn’t exist. Space didn’t exist. Time is part of the universe and
so it didn’t exist. Time, too, began with the big bang. Space itself expanded from a single
point to the enormous cosmos as the universe expanded over time.

What is the universe made of?

The universe contains all the energy and matter there is. Much of the observable matter in
the universe takes the form of individual atoms of hydrogen, which is the simplest atomic
element, made of only a proton and an electron (if the atom also contains a neutron, it is
instead called deuterium). Two or more atoms sharing electrons is a molecule. Many
trillions of atoms together is a dust particle. Smoosh a few tons of carbon, silica, oxygen,
ice, and some metals together, and you have an asteroid. Or collect 333,000 Earth masses
of hydrogen and helium together, and you have a Sun-like star.

For the sake of practicality, humans categorize clumps of matter based on their attributes.
Galaxies, star clusters, planets, dwarf planets, rogue planets, moons, rings, ringlets,
comets, meteorites, raccoons — they’re all collections of matter exhibiting characteristics
different from one another but obeying the same natural laws.

Scientists have begun tallying those clumps of matter and the resulting numbers are pretty
wild. Our home galaxy, the Milky Way, contains at least 100 billion stars, and the
observable universe contains at least 100 billion galaxies. If galaxies were all the same size,
that would give us 10 thousand billion billion (or 10 sextillion) stars in the observable
universe.
But the universe also seems to contain a bunch of matter and energy that we can’t see or
directly observe. All the stars, planets, comets, sea otters, black holes and dung beetles
together represent less than 5 percent of the stuff in the universe. About 27 percent of the
remainder is dark matter, and 68 percent is dark energy, neither of which are even remotely
understood. The universe as we understand it wouldn’t work if dark matter and dark energy
didn’t exist, and they’re labeled “dark” because scientists can’t seem to directly observe
them. At least not yet.

How has our view of the universe changed over time?

Human understanding of what the universe is, how it works and how vast it is has changed
over the ages. For countless lifetimes, humans had little or no means of understanding the
universe. Our distant ancestors instead relied upon myth to explain the origins of
everything. Because our ancestors themselves invented them, the myths reflect human
concerns, hopes, aspirations or fears rather than the nature of reality.

Several centuries ago, however, humans began to apply mathematics, writing and new
investigative principles to the search for knowledge. Those principles were refined over
time, as were scientific tools, eventually revealing hints about the nature of the universe.
Only a few hundred years ago, when people began systematically investigating the nature
of things, the word “scientist” didn’t even exist (researchers were instead called “natural
philosophers” for a time). Since then, our knowledge of the universe has repeatedly leapt
forward. It was only about a century ago that astronomers first observed galaxies beyond
our own, and only a half-century has passed since humans first began sending spacecraft
to other worlds.

In the span of a single human lifetime, space probes have voyaged to the outer solar
system and sent back the first up-close images of the four giant outermost planets and their
countless moons; rovers wheeled along the surface on Mars for the first time; humans
constructed a permanently crewed, Earth-orbiting space station; and the first large space
telescopes delivered jaw-dropping views of more distant parts of the cosmos than ever
before. In the early 21st century alone, astronomers discovered thousands of planets
around other stars, detected gravitational waves for the first time and produced the first
image of a black hole.

With ever-advancing technology and knowledge, and no shortage of imagination, humans

continue to lay bare the secrets of the cosmos. New insights and inspired notions aid in this
pursuit, and also spring from it. We have yet to send a space probe to even the nearest of
the billions upon billions of other stars in the galaxy. Humans haven’t even explored all the
worlds in our own solar system. In short, most of the universe that can be known
remains unknown.

The universe is nearly 14 billion years old, our solar system is 4.6 billion years old, life on
Earth has existed for maybe 3.8 billion years, and humans have been around for only a few
hundred thousand years. In other words, the universe has existed roughly 56,000 times
longer than our species has. By that measure, almost everything that’s ever happened did
so before humans existed. So of course we have loads of questions — in a cosmic sense,
we just got here.

Our first few decades of exploring our own solar system are merely a beginning. From here,
just one human lifetime from now, our understanding of the universe and our place in it will
have undoubtedly grown and evolved in ways we can today only imagine.

Galaxies – T H E B U I L D I N G B L O C K S O F T H E U N I V E R S E

Galaxies are vast cosmic islands of stars, gas, dust, and dark matter held together by gravity.
Hubble’s keen eye has revealed intricate details of the shapes, structures, and histories of
galaxies — whether alone, as part of small groups, or within immense clusters. From
supermassive black holes at galactic centers to giant bursts of star formation to titanic collisions
between galaxies, these discoveries allow astronomers to probe the current properties of galaxies
as well as examine how they formed and developed over time.
TYPES OF GALAXIES

What Kinds of Galaxies Are There?

Astronomers classify galaxies into three major categories: elliptical, spiral and irregular. These
galaxies span a wide range of sizes, from dwarf galaxies containing as few as 100 million stars to
giant galaxies with more than a trillion stars.

Ellipticals, which account for about one-third of all galaxies, vary from nearly circular to very
elongated. They possess comparatively little gas and dust, contain older stars and are not actively
forming stars anymore. The largest and rarest of these, called giant ellipticals, are about 300,000
light-years across. Astronomers theorize that these are formed by the mergers of smaller
galaxies. Much more common are dwarf ellipticals, which are only a few thousand light-years
wide.

Spiral galaxies appear as flat, blue-white disks of stars, gas and dust with yellowish bulges in
their centers. These galaxies are divided into two groups: normal spirals and barred spirals. In
barred spirals, the bar of stars runs through the central bulge. The arms of barred spirals usually
start at the end of the bar instead of from the bulge. Spirals are actively forming stars and
comprise a large fraction of all the galaxies in the local universe.

Irregular galaxies, which have very little dust, are neither disk-like nor elliptical. Astronomers
often see irregular galaxies as they peer deeply into the universe, which is equivalent to looking
back in time. These galaxies are abundant in the early universe, before spirals and ellipticals
developed.

Aside from these three classic categories, astronomers have also identified many unusually
shaped galaxies that seem to be in a transitory phase of galactic development. These include
those in the process of colliding or interacting, and those with active nuclei ejecting jets of gas.
DARK MATTER

What Is Dark Matter?

In the late 1970s, astronomer Vera Rubin made the surprising discovery of dark matter. She was
studying how galaxies spin when she realized the vast spiral Andromeda Galaxy seemed to be
rotating strangely. In an apparent violation of Newton and Kepler’s Laws, the material at the
galaxy’s edges was moving just as fast as the material near the center, even though most of the
mass she could see was concentrated at the center. Some extra non-visible mass, dubbed dark
matter, appeared to be holding the galaxy together. She soon discovered that a huge halo of dark
matter was present in galaxy after galaxy that she examined. 

Nearly half a century later, scientists still don’t know what dark matter is. They do know,
however, that dark matter comprises some 84 percent of the universe’s material. Its invisible and
ubiquitous presence affects how stars move within galaxies, how galaxies tug on each other and
how matter clumped together in the early universe.

Some of the best evidence for the existence of dark matter comes from galaxy cluster 1E 0657-
556, also known as the Bullet Cluster. This cluster was formed after the collision of two large
clusters of galaxies, the most energetic event known in the universe since the big bang.  Because
the major components of the cluster pair — stars, gas and the apparent dark matter — behave
differently during collision, scientists were able to study them separately.

The galaxies’ stars, which the Hubble and Magellan telescopes observed in visible light, were
mostly unaffected by the collision, and passed right through. The hot gas from the two colliding
clusters, seen in X-ray wavelengths by the Chandra X-ray Observatory, contains most of the
cluster pair’s normal matter. Because the gases interact electromagnetically, the gases of both
clusters slowed down much more than the stars. The third element in this collision, the dark
matter, was detected indirectly by the gravitational lensing of background objects.
The dark matter by definition does not interact electromagnetically (i.e., with light) – it’s dark!
So during the collision, the dark matter clumps from the two clusters slide quietly past one
another, just like the stars, leaving the hot gas (most of the normal matter) behind. The
gravitational lensing stayed with the dark matter and not the gas. If hot gas was the most massive
component in the clusters, such an effect would not be seen. Instead, the observations appear to
be the first direct proof of dark matter.

GALAXY COLLISIONS
Can Galaxies Collide?

While the distances between galaxies seem large, so too are galaxies’ diameters. Compared to
stars, galaxies are relatively close to one another. They interact and even collide. When galaxies
collide, they pass through each other; their stars don’t crash into each other because of the
immense distances between them. However, gravitational interactions between colliding galaxies
could create new waves of star formation, supernovas and even black holes. Collisions do distort
a galaxy’s shape and computer models show that collisions between spiral galaxies can
eventually make ellipticals.

Four billion years from now, our own Milky Way galaxy is destined for a collision with the
neighboring spiral Andromeda galaxy. The Sun will likely be flung into a new region of our
galaxy, but our Earth and solar system are in no danger of being destroyed. Andromeda, also
known as M31, is now 2.5 million light-years away, but it is inexorably falling toward the Milky
Way under the mutual pull of gravity between the two galaxies and the invisible dark matter that
surrounds them both.

Computer simulations derived from Hubble data show that it will take an additional two billion
years or more after the encounter for the interacting galaxies to completely merge under the tug
of gravity. They will reshape into a single elliptical galaxy similar to the kind commonly seen in
the local universe. Simulations show that our solar system will probably be tossed much farther
from the galactic core than it is today.
To make matters more complicated, the third largest galaxy in the Local Group, the Triangulum
galaxy or M33, will join in the collision and perhaps later merge with the Andromeda/Milky
Way pair. There is a small chance that M33 will hit the Milky Way first.

GALAXY FORMATION

How do Galaxies Form?

The appearance and make-up of galaxies are shaped over billions of years by interactions with
groups of stars and other galaxies. While we don't know for certain how galaxies formed and
took the many shapes that we presently see, we have some ideas about their origins and
evolution. Using supercomputers, scientists can look back in time and simulate how a galaxy
may have formed in the early universe and grown into what we see today.

Astronomer Edwin Hubble’s observations led to the idea that the universe is expanding.
Scientists estimate the age of the universe at 13.8 billion years based on the rate of expansion.
Because the deeper you look into space, the further you see back in time, we can conclude that
galaxies several billions of light-years away formed fairly soon after the big bang. While most
galaxies formed early, data indicates that some galaxies have formed within the past few billion
years — relatively recently in cosmic terms.

The early universe was filled mainly with hydrogen and helium, with some areas slightly denser
than others. These dense areas slightly slowed the universe’s expansion, allowing the hydrogen
and helium to accumulate into small clouds swirling through space.  Gravity caused the gas in
these clouds to collapse and form the first generation of stars. These first stars rapidly burned
out. 

Gravity continued to collapse the clouds. As other clouds came close to each other, gravity sent
them careening into one another and knitted the clouds into larger, spinning packs.  As the clouds
further collapsed, they became rotating disks, which amassed more gas and dust. New stars
formed, creating extensive spiral arms filled with colonies of stars. Sprinkled along the periphery
were globular clusters, along with a halo of gas, dust and dark matter.

While Hubble is unable to see the very first galaxies, it can track the development of galaxies
over much of cosmic time. The series of Hubble Deep Field images and other deep surveys have
uncovered galaxies at many different distances out in the universe, and therefore at many
different times in their development. Farther galaxies, seen earlier in time, have less developed
structure. Nearer galaxies, seen later in time, grow to resemble the familiar galaxy shapes we see
in the local universe.

THE BIG BANG

Did you know that the matter in your body is billions of years old?

According to most astrophysicists, all the matter found in the universe today -- including the
matter in people, plants, animals, the earth, stars, and galaxies -- was created at the very first
moment of time, thought to be about 13 billion years ago.

The universe began, scientists believe, with every speck of its energy jammed into a very tiny
point. This extremely dense point exploded with unimaginable force, creating matter and
propelling it outward to make the billions of galaxies of our vast universe. Astrophysicists
dubbed this titanic explosion the Big Bang.

The Big Bang was like no explosion you might witness on earth today. For instance, a hydrogen
bomb explosion, whose center registers approximately 100 million degrees Celsius, moves
through the air at about 300 meters per second. In contrast, cosmologists believe the Big Bang
flung energy in all directions at the speed of light (300,000,000 meters per second, a million
times faster than the H-bomb) and estimate that the temperature of the entire universe was 1000
trillion degrees Celsius at just a tiny fraction of a second after the explosion. Even the cores of
the hottest stars in today's universe are much cooler than that.

There's another important quality of the Big Bang that makes it unique. While an explosion of a
man-made bomb expands through air, the Big Bang did not expand through anything. That's
because there was no space to expand through at the beginning of time. Rather, physicists
believe the Big Bang created and stretched space itself, expanding the universe.

A Cooling, Expanding Universe

For a brief moment after the Big Bang, the immense heat created conditions unlike any
conditions astrophysicists see in the universe today. While planets and stars today are composed
of atoms of elements like hydrogen and silicon, scientists believe the universe back then was too
hot for anything other than the most fundamental particles -- such as quarks and photons.

But as the universe quickly expanded, the energy of the Big Bang became more and more
"diluted" in space, causing the universe to cool. Popping open a beer bottle results in a roughly
similar cooling, expanding effect: gas, once confined in the bottle, spreads into the air, and the
temperature of the beer drops.

Rapid cooling allowed for matter as we know it to form in the universe, although physicists are
still trying to figure out exactly how this happened. About one ten-thousandth of a second after
the Big Bang, protons and neutrons formed, and within a few minutes these particles stuck
together to form atomic nuclei, mostly hydrogen and helium. Hundreds of thousands of years
later, electrons stuck to the nuclei to make complete atoms.

About a billion years after the Big Bang, gravity caused these atoms to gather in huge clouds of
gas, forming collections of stars known as galaxies. Gravity is the force that pulls any objects
with mass towards one another -- the same force, for example, that causes a ball thrown in the air
to fall to the earth.

Where do planets like earth come from? Over billions of years, stars "cook" hydrogen and
helium atoms in their hot cores to make heavier elements like carbon and oxygen. Large stars
explode over time, blasting these elements into space. This matter then condenses into the stars,
planets, and satellites that make up solar systems like our own.

How do we know the Big Bang happened?

Astrophysicists have uncovered a great deal of compelling evidence over the

past hundred years to support the Big Bang theory. Among this evidence is
the observation that the universe is expanding. By looking at light emitted
by distant galaxies, scientists have found that these galaxies are rapidly
moving away from our galaxy, the Milky Way. An explosion like the Big
Bang, which sent matter flying outward from a point, explains this
observation.

Another critical discovery was the observation of low levels of microwaves

throughout space. Astronomers believe these microwaves, whose temperature is

about -270 degrees Celsius, are the remnants of the extremely high-temperature

radiation produced by the Big Bang.

Interestingly, astronomers can get an idea of how hot the universe used to
be by looking at very distant clouds of gas through high-power telescopes.
Because light from these clouds can take billions of years to reach our
telescopes, we see such bodies as they appeared eons ago. Lo and behold,
these ancient clouds of gas seem to be hotter than younger clouds.

Scientists have also been able to uphold the Big Bang theory by measuring
the relative amounts of different elements in the universe. They've found
that the universe contains about 74 percent hydrogen and 26 percent helium
by mass, the two lightest elements. All the other heavier elements --
including elements common on earth, such as carbon and oxygen -- make
up just a tiny trace of all matter.

So how does this prove anything about the Big Bang? Scientists have shown,
using theoretical calculations, that these abundances could only have been
made in a universe that began in a very hot, dense state, and then quickly
cooled and expanded. This is exactly the kind of universe that the Big Bang
theory predicts.

The Milky Way Galaxy

Our Sun (a star) and all the planets around it are part of a galaxy known as the
Milky Way Galaxy. A galaxy is a large group of stars, gas, and dust bound
together by gravity. They come in a variety of shapes and sizes. The Milky Way
is a large barred spiral galaxy. All the stars we see in the night sky are in our
own Milky Way Galaxy. Our galaxy is called the Milky Way because it appears
as a milky band of light in the sky when you see it in a really dark area.

It is very difficult to count the number of stars in the Milky Way from our
position inside the galaxy. Our best estimates tell us that the Milky Way is
made up of approximately 100 billion stars. These stars form a
large disk whose diameter is about 100,000 light years. Our Solar System is
about 25,000 light years away from the center of our galaxy – we live in the
suburbs of our galaxy. Just as the Earth goes around the Sun, the Sun goes
around the center of the Milky Way. It takes 250 million years for our Sun and
the solar system to go all the way around the center of the Milky Way.
We can only take pictures of the Milky Way from inside the galaxy, which
means we don't have an image of the Milky Way as a whole. Why do we think
it is a barred spiral galaxy, then? There are several clues.
The first clue to the shape of the Milky Way comes from the bright band of
stars that stretches across the sky (and, as mentioned above, is how the Milky
Way got its name). This band of stars can be seen with the naked eye in
places with dark night skies. That band comes from seeing the disk of stars
that forms the Milky Way from inside the disk, and tells us that our galaxy is
basically flat.

Several different telescopes, both on the ground and in space, have taken
images of the disk of the Milky Way by taking a series of pictures in different
directions – a bit like taking a panoramic picture with your camera or phone.
The concentration of stars in a band adds to the evidence that the Milky Way
is a spiral galaxy. If we lived in an elliptical galaxy, we would see the stars of
our galaxy spread out all around the sky, not in a single band.

Another clue comes when astronomers map young, bright stars and clouds of

ionized hydrogen in the Milky Way's disk. These clouds, called HII regions, are
ionized by young, hot stars and are basically free protons and electrons. These
are both important marker of spiral arms in other spiral galaxies we see, so
mapping them in our own galaxy can give a clue about the spiral nature of the
Milky Way. There are bright enough that we can see them through the disk of
our galaxy, except where the region at the center of our galaxy gets in the
way.

There has been some debate over the years as to whether the Milky Way has
two spiral arms or four. The latest data shows that it has four arms, as shown
in the artist's illustration below.

Additional clues to the spiral nature of the Milky Way come from a variety of
other properties. Astronomers measure the amount of dust in the Milky Way
and the dominant colors of the light we see, and they match those we find in
other typical spiral galaxies. All of this adds up to give us a picture of the Milky
Way, even though we can't get outside to see the whole thing.

There are billions of other galaxies in the Universe. Only three galaxies outside
our own Milky Way Galaxy can be seen without a telescope, and appear as
fuzzy patches in the sky with the naked eye. The closest galaxies that we can
see without a telescope are the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds.
These satellite galaxies of the Milky Way can be seen from the southern
hemisphere. Even they are about 160,000 light years from us. The
Andromeda Galaxy is a larger galaxy that can be seen from the northern
hemisphere (with good eyesight and a very dark sky). It is about 2.5 million
light years away from us, but its getting closer, and researchers predict that in
about 4 billion years it will collide with the Milky Way. , i.e., it takes light 2.5
million years to reach us from one of our "nearby" galaxies. The other galaxies
are even further away from us and can only be seen through telescopes.

What Is Dark Energy?

Dark energy is an enigmatic phenomenon that acts in opposition to gravity and is
responsible for accelerating the expansion of the universe. Though dark
energy constitutes three-fourths of the mass-energy of the cosmos, its underlying nature
continues to elude physicists. Dark energy has no real connections to dark matter,
beyond sharing the word dark, which just means that scientists don't really know what
these things are.
Who discovered dark energy? 
The realization that the universe is expanding can be traced back to the American
astronomer Edwin Hubble, who noticed, in 1929, that the farther a galaxy is from the
Earth, the faster it is moving away from us. This doesn't mean that our planet is the
center of the universe, but rather that everything in space is moving away from
everything else at a constant rate. 
Nearly 60 years after Hubble's revelation, scientists made another startling discovery.
Researchers had long been trying to precisely measure cosmic distances by looking at
the light of faraway stars. In the late 1990s, after examining distant supernovas, two
independent teams found that the stellar explosions' light is dimmer than expected. This
indicates that the universe is not only expanding, but also accelerating in its expansion. 

That finding has given physicists cause to scratch their heads ever since then, also
earning its discoverers the Nobel Prize in physics in 2011. 
What does dark energy do?
Though researchers don't entirely understand dark energy, they have used their
knowledge of the phenomenon to construct models of the universe that explain everything
from the Big Bang to the modern-day large-scale structure of galaxies. Some of these
models predict that dark energy will rip apart everything in existence billions of years
from now.

The leading explanation of dark energy suggests that it is a type of pent-up energy
inherent in the fabric of space-time. This simple model works very well practically, and it
is a straightforward addition to the cosmological model without having to modify the law
of gravity.

An alternative idea posits that dark energy is an additional fundamental force, joining
the four already known (gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear
forces). But this conjecture doesn't explain why humans don't notice this extra force in
our day-to-day lives. So, theorists have also built creative models suggesting that this
mysterious force is hidden in some way.

The measured value of dark energy is currently the subject of an intense debate between
rival factions in physics. Some researchers have measured dark energy's power using
the cosmic microwave background, a dim echo of the Big Bang, and produced one
estimate.

But other astronomers, who measure dark energy's strength using the light of distant
cosmic objects, have produced a different value, and nobody has yet been able to
explain the discrepancy. Some experts have suggested that dark energy's power varies
over time, though proponents of that idea have yet to convince a majority of their peers
of this explanation.

What Is a Black Hole?

A black hole is a place in space where gravity pulls so much that even light can not get out. The
gravity is so strong because matter has been squeezed into a tiny space. This can happen when a
star is dying.

Because no light can get out, people can't see black holes. They are invisible. Space telescopes with
special tools can help find black holes. The special tools can see how stars that are very close to
black holes act differently than other stars.

How Big Are Black Holes?

Black holes can be big or small. Scientists think the smallest black holes are as small as just one
atom. These black holes are very tiny but have the mass of a large mountain. Mass is the amount of
matter, or "stuff," in an object.

Another kind of black hole is called "stellar." Its mass can be up to 20 times more than the mass of
the sun. There may be many, many stellar mass black holes in Earth's galaxy. Earth's galaxy is
called the Milky Way.

The largest black holes are called "supermassive." These black holes have masses that are more
than 1 million suns together. Scientists have found proof that every large galaxy contains a
supermassive black hole at its center. The supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way
galaxy is called Sagittarius A. It has a mass equal to about 4 million suns and would fit inside a very
large ball that could hold a few million Earths.
How Do Black Holes Form?
Scientists think the smallest black holes formed when the universe began.

Stellar black holes are made when the center of a very big star falls in upon itself, or collapses.
When this happens, it causes a supernova. A supernova is an exploding star that blasts part of the
star into space.

Scientists think supermassive black holes were made at the same time as the galaxy they are in.

If Black Holes Are "Black," How Do Scientists Know They Are There?
A black hole can not be seen because strong gravity pulls all of the light into the middle of the black
hole. But scientists can see how the strong gravity affects the stars and gas around the black hole .
Scientists can study stars to find out if they are flying around, or orbiting, a black hole.

When a black hole and a star are close together, high-energy light is made. This kind of light can not
be seen with human eyes. Scientists use satellites and telescopes in space to see the high-energy
light.

Could a Black Hole Destroy Earth?

Black holes do not go around in space eating stars, moons and planets. Earth will not fall into a
black hole because no black hole is close enough to the solar system for Earth to do that.

Even if a black hole the same mass as the sun were to take the place of the sun, Earth still would
not fall in. The black hole would have the same gravity as the sun. Earth and the other planets would
orbit the black hole as they orbit the sun now.

The sun will never turn into a black hole. The sun is not a big enough star to make a black hole.

How Is NASA Studying Black Holes?

NASA is using satellites and telescopes that are traveling in space to learn more about black holes.
These spacecraft help scientists answer questions about the universe.

Heliocentric versus Geocentric Models of the Universe

The night sky has been a subject of human curiosity from the earliest civilizations on earth.
From Babylonians, Egyptians, Greeks, and Indus all had a fascination for the celestial objects
and the elite of the intellectuals built theories to explain the miracles of the heavens. Earlier
they were accepted to be from the gods, and later the explanation took more logical and
scientific forms.
However, it was not until the Greeks development that proper theories about the earth and the
rotation of the planets emerged. Heliocentric and geocentric are two explanations of the
arrangement of the universe, including the solar system.

The geocentric model says that the earth is at the center of the cosmos or universe, and the
planets, the sun and the moon, and the stars circles around it. The early heliocentric models
consider the sun as the center, and the planets revolve around the sun.

More about Geocentric (supported by Aristotle and Ptolemy)

The most predominant theory of the structure of the universe in the ancient world was the
geocentric model. It says that the earth is at the center of the universe, and every other
celestial body rotates around the earth.

The origin of this theory is obvious; it is the elementary naked eye observation of the
movement of the objects in the sky. The path of an object in the sky always seems to be in the
same vicinity and repeatedly it rises from east and sets from west approximately at the same
points on the horizon. Also, the earth always seems to be stationary or motionless and still.
Therefore, the closest conclusion is that these objects move in circles around the earth.

Greeks were strong supporters of this theory, especially the great philosophers Aristotle and
Ptolemy. After the death of Ptolemy, the theory lasted for more than 2000 years unchallenged.

More about Heliocentric

The concept that the sun is at the center of the universe, also first emerged in Ancient Greece.
It was the Greek philosopher Aristarchus of Samos who proposed the theory in 3rd century BC,
but was not taken seriously because of the influence of the Aristotelian view of the universe
and lack of proof of the theory at that time.

It was during the Renaissance era that mathematician and Catholic cleric, Nicholaus Copernicus,
developed a mathematical model to explain the motion of the heavenly bodies. In his model,
the sun was at the center of the solar system and the planet moved around the sun, including
the earth. And the moon was considered to move around the earth.

This changed the way of thinking about the universe and differed from the religious beliefs at
that time. The major feature of the Copernican theory can be summarized as follows:

1. The motion of the celestial bodies is uniform, eternal, and circular or compounded of several
circles.

2. The center of the cosmos is the Sun.

3. Around the Sun, in the order of Mercury, Venus, Earth and Moon, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn
moves in their own orbits and the stars are fixed in the sky.

4. The earth has three motions; daily rotation, annual revolution, and annual tilting off its axis.

5. The retrograde motion or the backward motion of the planets is as explained by the Earth’s
motion.

6. The distance from the Earth to the Sun is small compared to the distance to the stars.

Heliocentric versus Geocentric: what is the difference between the two models?

• In the geocentric model, the earth is considered as the center of the universe, and all celestial
bodies move around the earth (planets, moon, sun and the stars).

• In the heliocentric model, the sun is considered as the center of the universe, and the celestial
bodies move around the sun.

(During the course of development of astronomy, many theories of geocentric universe and
heliocentric universe were developed, and they have significant differences, especially
regarding the orbits, but the core principles are as described above.)

Earth's sun: Facts about the sun's age, size

and history
The sun lies at the heart of the solar system, where it is by far the largest object. It holds
99.8% of the solar system's mass and is roughly 109 times the diameter of the Earth —
about one million Earths could fit inside the sun. 

The surface of the sun is about 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit (5,500 degrees Celsius) hot,
while temperatures in the core reach more than 27 million F (15 million C), driven by
nuclear reactions. One would need to explode 100 billion tons of dynamite every second
to match the energy produced by the sun, according to NASA.

The sun is one of more than 100 billion stars in the Milky Way. It orbits some 25,000
light-years from the galactic core, completing a revolution once every 250 million years
or so. The sun is relatively young, part of a generation of stars known as Population I,
which are relatively rich in elements heavier than helium. An older generation of stars is
called Population II, and an earlier generation of Population III may have existed,
although no members of this generation are known yet.
The sun was born about 4.6 billion years ago. Many scientists think the sun and the rest
of the solar system formed from a giant, rotating cloud of gas and dust known as the
solar nebula. As the nebula collapsed because of its gravity, it spun faster and flattened
into a disk. Most of the material was pulled toward the center to form the sun.

The sun has enough nuclear fuel to stay much as it is now for another 5 billion years.
After that, it will swell to become a red giant. Eventually, it will shed its outer layers, and
the remaining core will collapse to become a white dwarf. Slowly, the white dwarf will
fade, and will enter its final phase as a dim, cool theoretical object sometimes known as
a black dwarf.

The sun and the atmosphere of the sun are divided into several zones and layers. The
solar interior, from the inside out, is made up of the core, radiative zone and the
convective zone. The solar atmosphere above that consists of the photosphere,
chromosphere, a transition region and the corona. Beyond that is the solar wind, an
outflow of gas from the corona.
1. Internal Structure
a. Core (2% of sun’s volume, 50% of sun’s mass)
b. Radiative zone (32% of volume, 48% of mass)
c. Convective zone (66% of volume, 2% of sun’s mass)
2. Solar Atmosphere
a. Photosphere (300 miles thick, Temp: 6,125 – 7,460)
b. Chromosphere (Temp: 35,500, made of spicules that are 600x6000 miles)
c. Transition region (few thousand miles thick, sheds UV light)
d. Corona (Temp: 500,000 to tens of millions when solar flares occur, )
e. Solar wind (matter of Corona is blown off as solar wind)

The core extends from the sun's center to about a quarter of the way to its surface.
Although it only makes up roughly 2% of the sun's volume, it is almost 15 times the
density of lead and holds nearly half of the sun's mass. Next is the radiative zone, which
extends from the core to 70% of the way to the sun's surface, making up 32 % of the
sun's volume and 48% of its mass. Light from the core gets scattered in this zone, so
that a single photon often may take a million years to pass through.

The convection zone reaches up to the sun's surface, and makes up 66% of the sun's
volume but only a little more than 2% of its mass. Roiling "convection cells" of gas
dominate this zone. Two main kinds of solar convection cells exist — granulation cells
about 600 miles (1,000 kilometers) wide and supergranulation cells about 20,000 miles
(30,000 km) in diameter.

The photosphere is the lowest layer of the sun's atmosphere, and emits the light we
see. It is about 300 miles (500 km) thick, although most of the light comes from its
lowest third. Temperatures in the photosphere range from 11,000 F (6,125 C) at the
bottom to 7,460 F (4,125 C) at the top. Next up is the chromosphere, which is hotter, up
to 35,500 F (19,725 C), and is apparently made up entirely of spiky structures known as
spicules typically some 600 miles (1,000 km) across and up to 6,000 miles (10,000 km)
high.

After that is the transition region a few hundred to a few thousand miles thick, which is
heated by the corona above it and sheds most of its light as ultraviolet rays. At the top is
the super-hot corona, which is made of structures such as loops and streams of ionized
gas. The corona generally ranges from 900,000 F (500,000 C) to 10.8 million F (6
million C) and can even reach tens of millions of degrees when a solar flare occurs.
Matter from the corona is blown off as the solar wind.

The sun's magnetic field is typically only about twice as strong as Earth's magnetic field.
However, it becomes highly concentrated in small areas, reaching up to 3,000 times
stronger than usual. These kinks and twists in the magnetic field develop because the
sun spins more rapidly at the equator than at higher latitudes and because the inner
parts of the sun rotate more quickly than the surface. 

These distortions create features ranging from sunspots to spectacular eruptions known
as flares and coronal mass ejections. Flares are the most violent eruptions in the solar
system, while coronal mass ejections are less violent but involve extraordinary amounts of
matter — a single ejection can spout roughly 20 billion tons (18 billion metric tons) of
matter into space.

Just like most other stars, the sun is made up mostly of hydrogen, followed by helium.
Nearly all the remaining matter consists of seven other elements — oxygen, carbon,
neon, nitrogen, magnesium, iron and silicon. For every 1 million atoms of hydrogen in
the sun, there are 98,000 of helium, 850 of oxygen, 360 of carbon, 120 of neon, 110 of
nitrogen, 40 of magnesium, 35 of iron and 35 of silicon. Still, hydrogen is the lightest of
all elements, so it only accounts for roughly 72% of the sun's mass, while helium makes
up about 26%.

Sunspots are relatively cool, dark features on the sun's surface that are often roughly
circular. They emerge where dense bundles of magnetic field lines from the sun's
interior break through the surface.

The number of sunspots varies as solar magnetic activity does — the change in this
number, from a minimum of none to a maximum of roughly 250 sunspots or clusters of
sunspots and then back to a minimum, is known as the solar cycle, and averages about
11 years long. At the end of a cycle, the magnetic field rapidly reverses its polarity. 

Ancient cultures often modified natural rock formations or built stone monuments to
mark the motions of the sun and moon, charting the seasons, creating calendars and
monitoring eclipses. Many believed the sun revolved around the Earth, with the ancient
Greek scholar Ptolemy formalizing this "geocentric" model in 150 B.C. Then, in
1543, Nicolaus Copernicus described a heliocentric (sun-centered) model of the solar
system, and in 1610, Galileo Galilei's discovery of Jupiter's moons confirmed that not all
heavenly bodies circled Earth.

Planet Earth: Facts About Its Orbit,

Atmosphere & Size
Earth, our home, is the third planet from the sun. While scientists continue to hunt for
clues of life beyond Earth, our home planet remains the only place in the universe
where we've ever identified life. 

Earth is the fifth-largest planet in the solar system. It's smaller than the four gas giants
— Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune — but larger than the three other rocky
planets, Mercury, Mars and Venus.

Earth has a diameter of roughly 8,000 miles (13,000 kilometers) and is round because
gravity pulls matter into a ball. But our home planet isn't perfectly round, rather, Earth is
really an "oblate spheroid," because its spin causes it to be squashed at its poles and
swollen at the equator.

Water covers roughly 71 percent of Earth's surface, with most of that water located in
our planet's oceans, and about a fifth of Earth's atmosphere consists of oxygen, produced
by plants. While scientists have been studying our planet for centuries, much has been
learned in recent decades by studying Earth from space using satellite technology.
Earth's orbit
While Earth orbits the sun, the planet is simultaneously spinning on an imaginary line
called an axis that runs from the North Pole to the South Pole. It takes Earth 23.934
hours to complete a rotation on its axis and 365.26 days to complete an orbit around the
sun.

Earth's axis of rotation is tilted in relation to the ecliptic plane, an imaginary surface
through the planet's orbit around the sun. This means the Northern and Southern
hemispheres will sometimes point toward or away from the sun depending on the time
of year, and this changes the amount of light the hemispheres receive, resulting in the
changing seasons.

Earth happens to orbit the sun within the so-called "Goldilocks zone," where
temperatures are just right to maintain liquid water on our planet's surface. Earth's orbit
is not a perfect circle, but rather it is an oval-shaped ellipse, similar to the orbits of all
the other planets in our solar system. Our planet is a bit closer to the sun in early
January and farther away in July, although this proximity has a much smaller effect on
Earth's temperature than the tilt of Earth's axis. 

Statistics about Earth's orbit, according to NASA:

 Average distance from the sun: 92,956,050 miles (149,598,262 km)
 Perihelion (closest approach to the sun): 91,402,640 miles (147,098,291 km)
 Aphelion (farthest distance from the sun): 94,509,460 miles (152,098,233 km)
 Length of solar day (single rotation on its axis): 23.934 hours
 Length of year (single revolution around the sun): 365.26 days
 Equatorial inclination to orbit: 23.4393 degrees

Earth's formation and evolution

Scientists think Earth was formed at roughly the same time as the sun and other planets
some 4.6 billion years ago when the solar system coalesced from a giant, rotating cloud
of gas and dust known as the solar nebula. As the nebula collapsed under the force of its
own gravity, it spun faster and flattened into a disk. Most of the material in that disk was
then pulled toward the center to form the sun.

Other particles within the disk collided and stuck together to form ever-larger bodies,
including Earth. Scientists think Earth started off as a waterless mass of rock.

"It was thought that because of these asteroids and comets flying around colliding with
Earth, conditions on early Earth may have been hellish," Simone Marchi, a planetary
scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, previously told
Space.com. 

However, in recent years, new analyses of minerals trapped within ancient microscopic
crystals suggest that there was liquid water already present on Earth during its first 500
million years, Marchi said.

Radioactive materials in the rock and increasing pressure deep within the Earth
generated enough heat to melt the planet's interior, causing some chemicals to rise to
the surface and form water, while others became the gases of the atmosphere. Recent
evidence suggests that Earth's crust and oceans may have formed within about 200
million years after the planet took shape.
Internal structure
Earth's core is about 4,400 miles (7,100 km) wide, slightly larger than half the Earth's
diameter and about the same size as Mars' diameter. The outermost 1,400 miles (2,250
km) of the core are liquid, while the inner core is solid; it's about four-fifths as big as
Earth's moon, at some 1,600 miles (2,600 km) in diameter. The core is responsible for
the planet's magnetic field, which helps to deflect harmful charged particles shot from the
sun.

1. Core (4,400 miles wide, outer core is liquid, inner is solid, responsible for planet’s
magnetic field deflecting harmful particles from sun, Temp: 3,700 to 7,000)
2. Mantle (1800 miles thick, semi liquid, its motion causes changes in continents,
earthquakes and volcanoes)
 3. Crust (Two kinds: 1. Dry land made of granite and silicate minerals, 2. Ocean
floor made of volcanic rock called basalt)

Above the core is Earth's mantle, which is about 1,800 miles (2,900 km) thick. The
mantle is not completely stiff but can flow slowly. Earth's crust floats on the mantle much
as a piece of wood floats on water. The slow motion of rock in the mantle shuffles
continents around and causes earthquakes, volcanoes and the formation of mountain
ranges.

Above the mantle, Earth has two kinds of crust. The dry land of the continents consists
mostly of granite and other light silicate minerals, while the ocean floors are made up
mostly of a dark, dense volcanic rock called basalt. Continental crust averages some 25
miles (40 km) thick, although it can be thinner or thicker in some areas. Oceanic crust is
usually only about 5 miles (8 km) thick. Water fills in low areas of the basalt crust to
form the world's oceans.

Earth gets warmer toward its core. At the bottom of the continental crust, temperatures
reach about 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit (1,000 degrees Celsius), increasing about 3
degrees F per mile (1 degree C per km) below the crust. Geologists think the
temperature of Earth's outer core is about 6,700 to 7,800 degrees F (3,700 to 4,300
degrees C) and that the inner core may reach 12,600 degrees F (7,000 degrees C) —
hotter than the surface of the sun.

Magnetic field
Earth's magnetic field is generated by currents flowing in Earth's outer core. The
magnetic poles are always on the move, with the magnetic North Pole accelerating its
northward motion to 24 miles (40 km) annually since tracking began in the 1830s. It will
likely exit North America and reach Siberia in a matter of decades.

Earth's magnetic field is changing in other ways, too. Globally, the magnetic field has
weakened 10 percent since the 19th century, according to NASA. These changes are mild
compared to what Earth's magnetic field has done in the past. A few times every million
years or so, the field completely flips, with the North and the South poles swapping
places. The magnetic field can take anywhere from 100 to 3,000 years to complete the
flip.
The strength of Earth's magnetic field decreased by about 90 percent when a field
reversal occurred in ancient past, according to Andrew Roberts, a professor at the
Australian National University. The drop makes the planet more vulnerable to solar
storms and radiation, which can could significantly damage satellites and
communication and electrical infrastructure.

"Hopefully, such an event is a long way in the future and we can develop future
technologies to avoid huge damage," Roberts said in a statement.
When charged particles from the sun get trapped in Earth's magnetic field, they smash
into air molecules above the magnetic poles, causing them to glow. This phenomenon is
known as the aurorae, the northern and southern lights.
Earth's atmosphere
Earth's atmosphere is roughly 78 percent nitrogen and 21 percent oxygen, with trace
amounts of water, argon, carbon dioxide and other gases. Nowhere else in the solar
system is there an atmosphere loaded with free oxygen, which is vital to one of the
other unique features of Earth: life.

Air surrounds Earth and becomes thinner farther from the surface. Roughly 100 miles
(160 km) above Earth, the air is so thin that satellites can zip through the atmosphere
with little resistance. Still, traces of atmosphere can be found as high as 370 miles (600
km) above the planet's surface.

1. Troposphere (Weather operations of earth happens here)

2. Stratosphere (30 miles above earth, contains ozone layer)
3.

The lowest layer of the atmosphere is known as the troposphere, which is constantly in
motion and why we have weather. Sunlight heats the planet's surface, causing warm air
to rise into the troposphere. This air expands and cools as air pressure decreases, and
because this cool air is denser than its surroundings, it then sinks and gets warmed by
the Earth again.

Above the troposphere, some 30 miles (48 km) above the Earth's surface, is the
stratosphere. The still air of the stratosphere contains the ozone layer, which was
created when ultraviolet light caused trios of oxygen atoms to bind together into ozone
molecules. Ozone prevents most of the sun's harmful ultraviolet radiation from reaching
Earth's surface, where it can damage and mutate life.

Water vapor, carbon dioxide and other gases in the atmosphere trap heat from the sun,
warming Earth. Without this so-called "greenhouse effect," Earth would probably be too
cold for life to exist, although a runaway greenhouse effect led to the hellish conditions
now seen on Venus.

Earth-orbiting satellites have shown that the upper atmosphere actually expands during
the day and contracts at night due to heating and cooling.

Chemical composition
Oxygen is the most abundant element in rocks in Earth's crust, composing roughly 47
percent of the weight of all rock. The second most abundant element is silicon, at 27
percent, followed by aluminum, at 8 percent; iron, at 5 percent; calcium, at 4 percent;
and sodium, potassium and magnesium, at about 2 percent each.
Earth's core consists mostly of iron and nickel and potentially smaller amounts of lighter
elements, such as sulfur and oxygen. The mantle is made of iron and magnesium-rich
silicate rocks. (The combination of silicon and oxygen is known as silica, and minerals
that contain silica are known as silicate minerals.)
Earth's moon
Earth's moon is 2,159 miles (3,474 km) wide, about one-fourth of Earth's diameter. Our
planet has one moon, while Mercury and Venus have none and all the other planets in
our solar system have two or more.

The leading explanation for how Earth's moon formed is that a giant impact knocked the
raw ingredients for the moon off the primitive, molten Earth and into orbit. Scientists
have suggested that the object that hit the planet had roughly 10 percent the mass of
Earth, about the size of Mars.
Life on Earth
Earth is the only planet in the universe known to possess life. The planet boasts several
million species of life, living in habitats ranging from the bottom of the deepest ocean to
a few miles into the atmosphere. And scientists think far more species remain to be
discovered.

Researchers suspect that other candidates for hosting life in our solar system — such
as Saturn's moon Titan or Jupiter's moon Europa — could house primitive living
creatures. Scientists have yet to precisely nail down exactly how our primitive ancestors
first showed up on Earth. One solution suggests that life first evolved on the nearby
planet Mars, once a habitable planet, then traveled to Earth on meteorites hurled from
the Red Planet by impacts from other space rocks.

"It's lucky that we ended up here, nevertheless, as certainly Earth has been the better of
the two planets for sustaining life," biochemist Steven Benner, of the Westheimer
Institute for Science and Technology in Florida, told Space.com. "If our hypothetical
Martian ancestors had remained on Mars, there might not have been a story to tell."

Planets in Solar System