Résultats Éditeur "Charles River Editors" dans Astronomie et science de l’espace

Many of us on Earth live in a home with a street address, city, and zip code. But we have another address, which astronomers and astrophysicists refer to as our "cosmic address": Earth, Solar System, Milky Way, Local Group, Virgo Supercluster, the Universe. Consider the vast scales that our cosmic address spans. Understandably, it's hard for our brains to truly imagine it. Our galaxy, The Milky Way, is populated with somewhere between 100-400 billion stars, one of which is our Sun, an average, run-of-the-mill star.

The Apollo space program is the most famous and celebrated in American history, but the first successful landing of men on the moon, during Apollo 11, had complicated roots dating back over a decade; it also involved one of NASA's most infamous tragedies. Landing on the moon presented an ideal goal all on its own, but the government's urgency in designing the Apollo program was actually brought about by the Soviet Union, which spent much of the 1950s leaving the United States in its dust (and rocket fuel).

By the time the Hubble telescope reached orbit, it was already the world’s most famous telescope, but it was also the most scorned. The telescope cost nearly two billion dollars more to complete than anticipated, and to make matters worse, the first images it sent back were skewed. However, within about a year of fixing it, the telescope captured images of a major event in the solar system.

While modern technology has helped astronomers view the furthest reaches of the Solar System, it has also allowed scientists to start discovering planets orbiting distant stars. To make it easier to assess the relative mass and size of the new planets being discovered, scientists give these measurements as multiples of those properties for either Jupiter or Earth