It’s been over 2 weeks since the New Horizons spacecraft completed its flyby of Pluto, and a lot of us are still wondering about its true significance (beyond amazing photos, of course!). Want your questions answered? Check out this SciShow video!
Videos
CRASH COURSE: INTRO TO ASTRONOMY
For those of you not familiar with it, CrashCourse is a Youtube channel that produces educational “crash course” videos about everything from economics and history to science and medicine. Fortunately, they’ve also done 25+ videos, each on a different astronomy topic (Stars, the Oort Cloud, Venus, etc…), that are easy to understand and fun to watch.
CAN’T COMPREHEND DISTANCES IN SPACE? WATCH THIS VIDEO!
Our Sun is 150,000,000 km (93,000,000 miles) away from Earth. Seems like a lot, right?
WRONG!
The Sun is down right close compared to other objects in space. Even the Andromeda Galaxy, our closest large neighbor, is a whopping 15,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles away. That’s 15 quintillion miles!
To cope with these unimaginably long distances, astronomers use other measurements — like AUs and light years — in their studies. If you want to learn how this all works, take a look at this video made by Astronomy Magazine:
Observing Basics: Distances in Space | Astronomy.com.
And, if you really want your mind blown, check out the interactive site Scale of the Universe, which illustrates how the tiniest sub-atomic particles to the largest structures in the universe compare in size.
