Have you ever wondered what you would weight on other planets like Mars? Well, I hear your weight depends on the size of the planet you are on or more importantly, the gravity of the planet. Larger planets have stronger gravity and make you weigh more and smaller planets with weaker gravity can make you very light.
Your weight is calculated as how much body mass you have and how much gravity is pulling down on you on the planet you are on.
mars and other planets in space">-> Check out this page and calculate your weight on the <-
The star in our system is called the Sun. It is really amazing for many reasons especially that the energy the Sun makes lets all of us on Earth live.
So how much energy does the Sun make and how does it work?
The Sun was born about 4.6 billion years ago and is made from space dust and gas, gravity eventally made all the space gas into the flaming ball shape we see in our sky.
Because of the huge amount of gravity, material in the center of the cloud was squeezed so tightly that it became hot enough to ignite nuclear fusion.
The Sun fuses hydrogen to make helium within the very middle of the Sun called the core.
How much Hydrogen does it burn or fuse? tons, literally, every second the Sun fuses or burns about 600 million tons of hydrogen, yielding 596 million tons of helium. The remaining four tons of hydrogen are converted to energy, which makes the Sun shine. As far as that number goes it is beyond what I can even imagine. I can not even picture how large 600 million tons is and that is per second!
I used to believe that there were things that are forever. The Earth, the Sun, the Moon, even the Rocks. But that is not true. Nothing in the Universe lasts forever and even something as giant and everlasting as the Sun, will eventually die.
But die may not be the correct word. matter is not lost, it just becomes something else. Stellar recycling.
Scientists believe that our Sun is half way through its lifecycle and in a few billion years, after it runs out of most of the hydrogen it uses, it will begin to expand as it starts burning other gasses and turn into a red giant. At the red giant stage the Sun may in fact get so large that it will engulf many of the planets around it. The planets that do not get engulfed by the gorged Sun, will become much hotter and evoporating things like water and ice into space.
The large Sun will begin to shed its layers over billions of years, creating a nebula and the Sun itself will become a small dwarf star untill it dies out.
1- Core. The Sun’s nuclear “furnace,” where fusion reactions initially combine hydrogen atoms to produce helium, yielding energy in the process.
2 -Radiative Zone. Energy moves through a surrounding envelope of gas toward the Sun’s surface.
3- Convection Zone. Big “bubbles” of hot gas transport energy to the surface.
4- Photosphere. The Sun’s visible surface. Because of its high temperature, it glows yellow.
5- Sunspot. A magnetic “storm” on the Sun’s surface.
Prominence. An eruption of hot gas that can extend thousands of miles into space.
6- Corona. The Sun’s outer atmosphere, which is heated by the magnetic field to millions of degrees.
Here are some of my favorite images from Nasa. They are of the Galexy, Sun, Moon, planets and the solar system. Also, there are some great colorful pictures of fascinating things like black holes and stellar nebula.
To download the wallpaper image of the nebula, click on the picture thumbnail to go to the large hi resolution photo, then you can set that image as your desktop wallpaper by right clicking and choosing set as wallpaper from the menu.
Snowflakes in the Universal Sky
Like cascading snowflakes un the instellar night, the strange shapes an and textures of the stars in the Snowflake Cluster abound in the Cone Nebula. These patterns result from the tumultuous unrest that accompanies the formation of the open cluster of stars known as NGC 2264. Bright stars from the cluster dot the field and they soon heat up and destroy the gas and dust mountains in which they formed. One such dust mountain is the famous Cone Nebula, visible in the above image on the left, pointing toward a bright star near the center of the field.
The Spiral Galexy
M51, whose name comes from being the 51st entry in Charles Messier’s catalog, is considered to be a classic example of a spiral galaxy. At a distance of about 30 million light years from Earth, it is also one of the brightest spirals in the night sky. A composite image of M51, also known as the Whirlpool Galaxy, shows the majesty of its structure in a dramatic new way through several of NASA’s orbiting observatories. X-ray data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory reveals point-like sources (purple) that are black holes and neutron stars in binary star systems. Chandra also detects a diffuse glow of hot gas that permeates the space between the stars. Optical data from the Hubble Space Telescope (green) and infrared emission from the Spitzer Space Telescope (red) both highlight long lanes in the spiral arms that consist of stars and gas laced with dust. A view of M51 with the GALEX telescope shows hot, young stars that produce lots of ultraviolet energy (blue).
The textbook spiral structure is thought be the result of an interaction M51 is experiencing with its close galactic neighbor, NGC 5195
Ghost Head Nebula
The Ghost Head Nebula, or NGC 2080, is a star-forming region in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of our own Milky Way Galaxy. The nebula spans about 50 light-years and this image, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, is shown in representative colors.
Evaporating Planet
Planet HD 209458b is evaporating. It is so close to its parent star that its heated atmosphere is simply expanding away into space. Some astronomers studying this distant planetary system now believe they have detected water vapor among the gases being liberated.
Quasars - Bursting With Stars and Black Holes
A growing black hole, called a quasar, can be seen at the center of a faraway galaxy in this artist’s concept. Using NASA’s Spitzer and Chandra Space Telescopes, astronomers discovered swarms of similar quasars hiding in dusty galaxies in the distant universe.
The new-found quasars belong to a long-lost population that had been theorized to be buried inside dusty, distant galaxies, but were never actually seen. While some quasars are easy to detect because they are oriented in such a way that their X-rays point toward Earth, others are oriented with their surrounding doughnut-clouds blocking the X-rays from our point of view. In addition, dust and gas in the galaxy itself can block the X-rays.
Astronomers had observed the most energetic of this dusty, or obscured, bunch before, but the “masses,” or more typical members of the population, remained missing. Using data from Spitzer and Chandra, scientists uncovered many of these lost quasars in the bellies of massive galaxies between 9 and 11 billion light-years away. Because the galaxies were also busy making stars, the scientists now believe most massive galaxies spent their adolescence building stars and black holes simultaneously
The Fairy of Eagle Nebula
The dust sculptures of the Eagle Nebula are evaporating. As powerful starlight whittles away these cool cosmic mountains, the statuesque pillars that remain might be imagined as mythical beasts
Here are some more of the coolest wallpaper images of awsome space clouds, black holes and nebulas.
