| Exploring The Universe |
| Check out these pictures of things
in, near or many miles from our solar system.
1 light year = 5,859,000,000,000 miles (that's 5.859 trillion) |
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| Start of Tour |
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| The Carina Nebula, below, is located 7,000 light years from Earth (that's 41 trillion miles). Nebulae are the birthplace of stars. | ||
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| Below are the remains of a supernova that exploded 300 years ago in the constellation Cassiopeia. The reason it has taken so long for us to see this event, is because the explosion occurred 10,000 light years from our solar system (58.59 trillion miles away). | ||
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Centaurus A is an irregular galaxy that scientist believe might have collided with another galaxy 100 million years ago. It is evident that some catastrophic event caused the explosive activity at Centaurus' core. |
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| Gas from the Magellanic Cloud (below), a nearby galaxy to the Milky Way, will recycle stars over and over again for billions of years. | ||
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Hale-Bopp, discovered in 1997, is a survivor or our early solar system. The comet is nothing more than a giant ice ball leaving ionized gas (blue) and dust (white) trailing for millions of miles. |
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Messier 33 (Pinwheel galaxy) is one of the closest galaxies to the Milky Way. It's only 2.7 million light years. At the center of the galaxy is a quasar surrounding a massive black hole. |
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This is an up close and personal view of our Sun. The large loops of gas are called prominences. Prominences can reach up to 100,000 feet into space from the sun's surface. |
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Messier 42 is in our galaxy 1,500 light years away. It is a nebula located in the sword of the constellation Orion. The brightest stars in the picture are called the Trapezium. They were discovered nearly 350 years ago.
That's the end of the tour. I hope you enjoyed your journey through the cosmos.
