Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
Outer space. Being essentially empty, outer space allows the earliest (redder) galaxies to be viewed without obstruction, as in the Webb's First Deep Field image. Outer space (or simply space) is the expanse that exists beyond Earth's atmosphere and between celestial bodies. [ 1] It contains ultra-low levels of particle densities, constituting ...
The cosmic distance ladder (also known as the extragalactic distance scale) is the succession of methods by which astronomers determine the distances to celestial objects. A direct distance measurement of an astronomical object is possible only for those objects that are "close enough" (within about a thousand parsecs) to Earth.
The enormous ratio of interplanetary distances to planetary diameters makes constructing a scale model of the Solar System a challenging task. As one example of the difficulty, the distance between the Earth and the Sun is almost 12,000 times the diameter of the Earth.
Interstellar travel is the hypothetical travel of spacecraft from one star system, solitary star, or planetary system to another. Interstellar travel is expected to prove much more difficult than interplanetary spaceflight due to the vast difference in the scale of the involved distances. Whereas the distance between any two planets in the ...
The interplanetary medium is responsible for several optical phenomena visible from Earth. Zodiacal light is a broad band of faint light sometimes seen after sunset and before sunrise, stretched along the ecliptic and appearing brightest near the horizon. This glow is caused by sunlight scattered by dust particles in the interplanetary medium ...
Bottom: Logarithmic scale of the Solar System and Voyager 1 's position.. The heliosphere is the magnetosphere, astrosphere, and outermost atmospheric layer of the Sun. It takes the shape of a vast, tailed bubble-like region of space. In plasma physics terms, it is the cavity formed by the Sun in the surrounding interstellar medium.
The Oort cloud ( / ɔːrt, ʊərt / ), [ 1] sometimes called the Öpik–Oort cloud, [ 2] is theorized to be a vast cloud of icy planetesimals surrounding the Sun at distances ranging from 2,000 to 200,000 AU (0.03 to 3.2 light-years ). [ 3][ note 1][ 4] The concept of such a cloud was proposed in 1950 by the Dutch astronomer Jan Oort, in whose ...
Spaceflight portal. v. t. e. Interplanetary spaceflight or interplanetary travel is the crewed or uncrewed travel between stars and planets, usually within a single planetary system. [1] In practice, spaceflights of this type are confined to travel between the planets of the Solar System. Uncrewed space probes have flown to all the observed ...