Little Geek Nat

You know about the solar system, don’t you? It belongs to our star, the Sun. The Sun's gravitational pull helps the planets have their orbit. Together, they form the solar system. I will be describing our Sun and planets. The Sun is our star. It gives our planet warmth and life for eons. Some cultures believe that the Sun is a god. It is around 1.5 million kilometers wide. Its surface temperature is around 6000°C but its core can reach temperatures of 15,000,000°C. One day the sun will explode into a white dwarf. When the sun‘s light is blocked out by the moon, it causes a solar eclipse. Plus, the Sun is the reason why there are seasons (along with the earth’s axis), equinoxes, and solstices. Coming up pretty small is Mercury. It is the smallest of the planets. Mercury has barely any gravity and a very thin atmosphere. However, it has scorching temperatures of 430 degrees Celsius and can suddenly drop to a teeth-chattering negative 180 degrees Celsius. It has a year...

When I was younger, sometimes I wonder how magnets work. I played with them a lot. Then I read a book about it and now I finally understand about the magnetic force and energy. I have decided to share this information with everyone. First, as everyone should know, magnets can attract magnetic things such as iron and steel, but not things like aluminum and plastic. Second, two magnets can attract each other as long as their poles are not the same. If they are the same, they will repel. Third, magnets don’t use magic. They use a magnetic field, which I will explain in the next paragraph. A magnetic field is a strong field around a magnet that attracts metallic objects or other magnets. A way to determine what your magnet’s magnetic field looks like is to sprinkle iron powder around the magnet and you should see that the pattern. This pattern is the same as the one in Earth’s magnetic field. There are three types of objects in terms of magnetic force. The first t...

In the beginning, about 4.6 billion years ago, our solar system did not exist. But then, the Sun formed from a collection of clouds of gas and dust in space. It later formed into a disc due to rapid rotation and gravity. At the center of rotation, the gas became dense and formed a baby star, our Sun! The leftover debris far away from the center formed the planets. One of them was Earth. It was just a big chunk of rock. More and more asteroids crashed into Earth, causing it to get bigger. It later turned into a sphere, and we went into the Precambrian Era , which was about 4.5 billion years ago. The carbon dioxide from the lava formed the atmosphere, and the water vapor in the atmosphere turned into clouds that brought rain that caused the seas to form. After the seas formed, the first microbe appeared. The microbes split to make more copies of them and evolved to get more complex and eventually turned into plants and animals. Cyanobacteria and algae helped our Earth to f...

Have you ever heard of Pluto? Not the Disney Character, Mickey’s dog, Pluto, nor the guy who was trying to beat up Popeye. That’s BLUTO. Or he is also called Brutus. So I am talking about the dwarf planet, Pluto. You might be thinking: “Hey, isn’t Pluto a Normal planet? And what on earth are dwarf planets?”Well, Pluto got demoted into a dwarf planet, which I will explain, and no, dwarf plants are not on earth. Dwarf planets are like mini-planets, but they have differences. First of all, most dwarf planets have strange orbits that are highly elliptical. They are very tiny as well. Unless you compare it with a human. Some still have moons like Pluto having the moon Charon (pronounced ‘sharon’), but others can have awkward shapes. Haumea, a dwarf planet in our solar system, is stretched to become like an egg! This is due to its rapid spinning. By the way, Eris is the biggest dwarf planet, not Pluto. Obviously, dwarf planets are in space, but not only in our solar system....

Galaxies are the huge, gassy, and massive things that fly around in space.  They are quite massive because they have a LOT of stars inside. They also hang around in groups! Now we will have a tour on galaxies and ‘talk’ to them personally! The Milky Way Hello! I’m the Milky Way and I’m the home of your precious star, The Sun! Deep in my center, I have a Supermassive Black Hole! I’m very thin like a disk and I’m only 1,000 light years (ly) thick. My bulge in the middle is 3,000 ly thick. However, I’m 100,000 ly across, which is really long! The Sun actually travels at 220,000 km/h! That’s because it’s orbiting my center! Andromeda Galaxy or M31 Good day! I’m your galaxy’s closest neighbor even though I’m still very far! However, I’m on a crash course with your galaxy because I’m a bit too close for comfort. For more information, see Colliding galaxies . Our new galaxy will be an elliptical galaxy called… ‘Milkdromeda’? Yeah, I know. It's uncreative, just comprom...

I am very sure that most people know about galaxies. But, what you (probably) didn’t know is that galaxies can emerge and form a different type of galaxies. Some can be really odd, you know! Why do galaxies collide? Because of gravity. Well, not gravity from the galaxies, it’s the gravity from dark matter. Later, they start getting nearer and nearer and nearer and finally they collide. However, this process may take billions of years. When galaxies collide together, what happens to all the planets and stars? NOTHING. Nothing happens because galaxies are actually mostly empty space. So the stars and planets never collide. The only thing that happens is that both galaxies become one and the galaxies get a new form. Oh, and also, it gets a new name. An example of colliding galaxies that will collide to each other is the Milky Way galaxy and the Andromeda galaxy. It will collide in around 4 billion years. The new galaxy will be formed in 10 billion years. In numerals tha...

Red giants are one of the biggest types of stars. An example of a red giant is Betelgeuse (pronounced bettle juice. Ugh.) and Antares. They are made when fusion in their core actually turns helium into carbon, then carbon into oxygen, then into silicon, then they die when they fuse into iron. They are much too massive and in the end…… BOOM, we have a supernova (Now THAT’S where gold and uranium are made). The biggest red giant known (so far) is UY Scuti, located in the constellation Scutum. To imagine how big it is, UY Scuti has about 1700 times of our Sun’s radius! However it is very far from us (9500 light years away). It is really large at a diameter of 1 - 1.3 billion miles but I think it should be near the end of its life. If it were to replace our Sun, it would instantly swallow Mercury, Venus, and all the way to Saturn. Not only that, but its extremely high gravity would gobble up almost all the solar system objects, and the leftovers would take over a thousand years to...