Electra Taurus Star -Tara

Electra is in the Taurus constellation. The stars brightness of 3.72 it is the third of the nine brightest stars in the Pleuades star cluster. It belongs to the B6III class, it is approxamitley 440 lightyears away from the sun. It is one of the four Pleiades stars classed as a giant. It is continually expanding due to the hydrogen fuel in the core.

Electra is sometimes occulated by other planets in our solar system it doesn’t happen vary often, infact the last time it happened was by Venus in 1841. Electra although it is best seen in January, is one of the Zodiac stars of the Taurus constellation, which is in the april 20 to may 20 cycle. The Pleuades star cluster and all the stars in it have an accurate age of 130 million years old.

Image from -
http://ottawa.rasc.ca/astronotes/2000/an0011i2.jpg

International Space Station-Ali

Weight
471,444 pounds
Habitable Volume
15,000 cubic feet
Dimensions
Span of Solar Arrays
240 feet
Length:
146 feet from Destiny Lab to Zvezda; 171 feet with a Progress docked
Truss 191 feet
Height:
90 feet
250 km to space station

Image from -
http://esamultimedia.esa.int/images/ISS/2952NASA.jpg

Bibliography

All images are credited at the bottom of each post

Jupiter Information from -
http://www.solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/profile.cfm?Object=Jupiter&Display=OverviewLong
http://www.kidscosmos.org/kid-stuff/jupiter-facts.html

Triton Information from -
http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/profile.cfm?Object=Nep_Triton
http://seds.lpl.arizona.edu/nineplanets/nineplanets/triton.html

Black Hole Information from -
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/blackhole_mw_040401.html
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn6937
http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/question.php?number=39

Dubhe Ursa Major Information from-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dubhe

Comet Information from -
http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/profile.cfm?Object=Comets
http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/?comets
http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/?why_comets

International Space Station Information from -
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/main/index.html
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2001/ast10mar_1.htm

Electra Taurus Star Information from -
http://www.astro.wisc.edu/~dolan/constellations/hr/1142.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electra_%28star%29
http://www.astro.uiuc.edu/~kaler/sow/electra.html

Dubhe Ursa Major -Tara

Dubhe is the second brightest star in the Big Dipper (Ursa Major) Constellation. It is a K star, which means it is only 500 million years old, compared to other stars it is quite young. It is the northern pointer star of its constellation. The other pointer is Polaris. But it is not one of Ursa Major’s moving stars; instead it is an evolved helium burning star. Which is approximately 123.5 light years away from us. It is not only an evolved helium based star, but it is a multiple star too. The star is orbited by a main sequence companion Dubhe B and Dubhe C.
The big dipper (formally Ursa Major) is a northern hemisphere constellation, it is visible throughout the whole year, but it is the easiest to see during dark clear skies. In earlier times Native Americans thought that it looked like a bear, and that the little dipper was the little bear. There are many Greek, Roman and Native stories on how the Big Dipper was put in the sky.
In the images above, there is the big dipper constellation, taken from a telescope and a diagram of the Native American diagram of the Bear.

Images from - http://www.physics.csbsju.edu/astro/constellations/images/ursa_major_l.gif
http://stardate.org/images/constellations/ursa_major.gif

Comets - Ali

Throughout history, people have been both awed and alarmed by comets, stars with "long hair" that appeared in the sky unannounced and unpredictably. We now know that comets are dirty-ice leftovers from the formation of our solar system around 4.6 billion years ago. They are among the least-changed objects in our solar system and, as such, may yield important clues about the formation of our solar system. We can predict the orbits of many of them, but not all.

As a result of their interactions with the outer major planets, the comets in the first group can be thrown out to the distant Oort cloud some 50,000 to 150,000 times further from the sun than the Earth. So-called long-period comets orbit the sun with periods ranging from 200 to several million years. With their orbital periods of about 5-7 years, these short-period comets orbit the sun frequently, lose much of their volatile ices, and are often far less visually impressive than their long-period cemetery cousins that arrive fresh from the Oort cloud.

Life on Earth began at the end of a period called the late heavy bombardment, some 3.8 billion years ago. The earliest known fossils on Earth date from 3.5 billion years ago and there is evidence that biological activity took place even earlier - just at the end of the period of late heavy bombardment.

Image from -
http://www.astronomy.com/asy/

Black Hole at the Centre of the Milky Way - Tessa

The Milky Way’s black hole has a mass that is 4 million times the suns, and was at one time estimated at 14 million miles across. It is about 26,000 light-years away, and around 15 billion years old. The black hole cannot be seen though, because everything that approaches it will be swallowed. This includes light.

Astronomers have for over 30 years have been trying to learn what causes the radio emissions and how near the black hole they derive from. Geoffrey Bower of the University of California-Berkely said that the radio emissions may originate from material that falls into the black hole.

The region called Sagittarius A* is radio-emitting and was discovered 1974. It was later determined to be linked with a central, huge black hole. The area is hidden in dust, so light telescopes can’t see or study Sagittarius A*. It is estimated that 350 million years ago the Black Hole was swallowing 10,000 billion tonnes of gas and dust every second. No one knows why the supply was cut off, but it is believed that it will start again sometime in the future.

Image from -
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/10/30/1067233284073.html?from=storyrhs

Moons of a Gas Giant - Neptune's Triton - Tessa

Triton is the largest moon of Neptune. The distance to get to Triton is 154 498 607 660 km, and it would take .9495651344990 lightyears. It has a diameter of 2,700 kilometres. Triton was discovered by William Lassell, in 1846, only a month after Neptune itself had been discovered. The moon is colder than any other object in the Solar System with a surface temperature of -235° C. It has a very thin atmosphere, but nitrogen ice particles can form thin clouds a few kilometres above its surface.

Triton is the only big satellite in the solar system to revolve around a planet that is rotating in the opposite direction. It has a density of 2.066 grams per cubic cm, which means Triton has more rock in it’s inside than the icy satellites of Saturn and Uranus. The high density has lead some scientists to believe that Neptune captured Triton while it travelled through space some time ago. It is also believed that tidal heating could have melted Triton, and that it may have been liquid until Neptune had captured it. It has also has enormous cracks on its surface, which spew out nitrogen gas and dust particles into the atmosphere.

Image from -
http://astrogeology.usgs.gov/Projects/BrowseTheSolarSystem/triton.html

Jupiter - Gas giant - Tara

Jupiter is the biggest planet in our solar system, It has 63 moons in total that scientist have discovered four of which are as big as a planet. The four largest moons are called the Galilean satellites because Galileo is believed to have discovered the planet. Scientists think that the 59 other moons orbiting around Jupiter may actually be asteroids captured by the planets gravitational force.

Jupiter’s climate is a very cold one, with temperatures on average of between -163° C to -121° C. It is famous for the great red spot, which is a large storm that was been around for over 300 years. Powerful winds, lightening and hurricanes are just some of the types of storms that the red spot experiences on a daily basis. Most of the clouds that occasionally cover Jupiter are ammonia based, the planet itself is mainly made up of Hydrogen, Helium and Nitrogen among other gasses.

Jupiter like many of the gas giants has rings. Its main ring is formed by dust thrown up by the interplanetary meteors that hit the planets Galilean sattelites. The ring itself is about 250,000 km from the planet itself. There is also the inner cloud like ring made up of small dark particles called a Halo. Finally there is a third ring surrounding Jupiter. It is really two ultra thin ringa made up of junk from two of the planets four large moons, it is called the Gossamer ring.

Like Earth, Jupiter has a magnetic field, only it is approximately 20,000 times stronger. Jupiter does have a radiation belt which is composed of many ions and electrons. If you were to fly to Jupiter on a space shuttle, it would take .94 lightyears to get there, the planet is approximately 778,330,000 km away from the sun.

Picture from -
www.astronomija.co.yu