Astronomy goes back thousands of years. It is likely that it originated in prehistoric times when our ancestors wondered about their future and the forces of nature, engraving the first symbols on stone or bone and painting the walls of caves. The first astronomical measurements date back to around 6700 years ago, when the first …
After many calculations and experiments in physics laboratories, it is believed that at the beginning of time, the universe was microscopic in size and contained a tremendous amount of energy. At the dawn of time, there was therefore no galaxy, no star, no planet, no atom, no gas, nothing. The whole universe was in a …
We must try to understand that the universe is something really gigantic, bigger than anything you can imagine! Even researchers who study this subject every day have trouble understanding what the universe looks like. We often imagine it as a kind of huge balloon filled with galaxies but a balloon that has no wall, no …
Visually, the quasars look like bluish stars a little blurry but unlike the stars, they are among the farthest objects in the universe. These are galaxies whose nucleus emits a lot of energy. Most quasars are hundreds of millions or even billions of light years away! On the thousands of cataloged quasars, two quasars are …
As the galaxies get closer to each other, they can collide. But as you can see by observing the stars near the Sun and the other galaxies with the telescope, there is a lot of empty space between the stars and even more between the galaxies. Also, when they collide, there is no impact, no …
Galaxies contain tens or hundreds of billions of stars like the Sun and all this mass attracts nearby galaxies. They gather in general to form clusters of galaxies and sometimes even clusters of galaxies that are called superclusters of galaxies. They can gather a handful of galaxies like the mass of the Big Dipper or …
Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is isolated in space but it is not alone. The galaxy closest to us is Andromeda, M31. It is 2.5 million light-years away, which is more than twenty times the diameter of the Milky Way! Between the two there is nothing, it is emptiness. And since there are no stars, …