What are AstroBytes?

Created by Mommies In Orbit, AstroBytes are small bits of information about astronomy. These bits and bites can range anywhere from information about Black Holes to Quasars!

Mars

Mars is the fourth planet from the sun and the second smallest planet in the solar system. It’s known as the Red Planet due to its ruddy red appearance in the sky. Mars is the most Earth like of all the other planets in the solar system.

What is an Orbit?

An orbit is a regular, repeating path that one object in space takes around another one. An object in an orbit is called a satellite. A satellite can be natural, like the Earth or the Moon. It can also be man-made, like the Space Shuttle or the ISS.

Beyond the Blue Skies

Our Solar System is the Sun and the planetary system around it. A “planetary system” is a group of non-stellar object (planets, dwarf planets, moons, asteroids, meteoroids, comets and cosmic dust) which orbit around a star.

Dark Matter

Stars – Light Years

The brightest star in our night sky is called, Sirius. Stars are so far away from us here on Earth that astronomers had to come up with a unit of measurement for such far distances. They came up with the term, light year. And a light year is the distance that light will travel in one year.

Light travels at 186,000 miles per second. Just one beam of light could circle our planet about 7.5 times in a mere second.

The Life Of A Star

All star begin their lives in what is called a nebula. The place of birth is made up of a giant cloud of hydrogen atoms, helium and interstellar dust. To be continued……