The asteroid belt is a torus-shaped region in the Solar System, located roughly between the orbits of the planets Jupiter and Mars, that is occupied by a great many solid, irregularly shaped bodies, of many sizes but much smaller than planets, called asteroids or minor planets.

RA 23h 29m 51s | Dec -5° 49′ 44″

The planet Mercury looks a little bit like Earth’s moon. Like our Moon, Mercury’s surface is covered with craters caused by space rock impacts. Mercury is the closest planet to the sun and the eighth largest. In addition to its heavily cratered surface Mercury also has regions of relatively smooth plains.

What is It? The Oort Cloud lies far beyond Pluto and the most distant edges of the Kuiper Belt. While the planets of our solar system orbit in a flat plane, the Oort Cloud is believed to be a giant spherical shell surrounding the Sun, planets and Kuiper Belt Objects.

The Oort Cloud is the most distant region of our solar system. Even the nearest objects in the Oort Cloud are thought to be many times farther from the Sun than the outer reaches of the Kuiper Belt.

Once you get beyond the Oort Cloud, there really isn’t much mass to speak of. The interstellar volume is largely occupied by the appropriately named Interstellar Medium, or ISM. Even the comets of the Oort cloud are pretty well gravitationally bound to long but inescapable orbits.

approximately 4.6 billion years

The rogue planet might not push us out of the habitable zone, but it would bring us much closer to the Sun for very short and exceptionally hot summers. Those extreme summers would be followed by long and super cold winters. Quick summers would leave us less time to grow crops.

No. The Earth has a lot of mass and moves extremely quickly in its orbit around the Sun; in science speak, we say its ‘momentum’ is large. This means that any object large enough to change the Earth’s orbit is also big enough to completely destroy it!

If a large enough object were to come close to the solar system, like a rogue white dwarf, rogue planet or even just a really big asteroid, then the planets orbit could shift. Bear in mind that this is extremely unlikely, as despite our limited technology to detect these large rogue objects, space is really big.

Yes, a star can turn into a planet, but this transformation only happens for a very particular type of star known as a brown dwarf. Despite beginning life as a star, a brown dwarf quickly uses up its heavy hydrogen, goes dark, cools, and spends the rest of its life as a planet.

When the helium fuel runs out, the core will expand and cool. The upper layers will expand and eject material that will collect around the dying star to form a planetary nebula. Finally, the core will cool into a white dwarf and then eventually into a black dwarf. This entire process will take a few billion years.

The life span of stars ranges from about 10 million years for the blue giants to about 100 billion years for the red dwarfs. The most common type of star is the red dwarf (lower right); the least common type is the blue giant (upper left).

As light from a star races through our atmosphere, it bounces and bumps through the different layers, bending the light before you see it. Since the hot and cold layers of air keep moving, the bending of the light changes too, which causes the star’s appearance to wobble or twinkle.

Proxima Centauri

Stars appear to twinkle when they are seen from the surface of the earth. The light from the stars gets refracted as they pass through different mediums when they come in contact with the wind and different temperatures and densities in the atmosphere.

The sunlight that reaches the earth’s atmosphere is scattered in all directions by the gases and dust particles present in the atmosphere. The blue colour is scattered more and hence the sky appears blue. This the reason for the blue appearance of the sky.

Why do stars twinkle at night? Stars seem to twinkle or change their brightness all the time. The movement of air (sometimes called turbulence) in the Earth’s atmosphere causes the starlight to get slightly bent as it travels from the distant star through the atmosphere to us on the ground.

Answer. The change in intensity of light coming from the stars is called twinkling of stars. The twinkling of stars occurs due to atmospheric refraction of star’s light. Hence, the star light reaching our eyes change continuously and stars appear to twinkle.

Twinkling of stars is due to atmospheric refraction of star light. The star light after entering the earth’s atmosphere undergoes refraction in a continuous manner before it reaches the Earth. The atmospheric refraction is due to change in the refractive index at different level in atmosphere.

Answer. The planets are at a lesser distance from us as compared to the stars. Since the planets are closer to us, they appear much bigger and the light appears to come from more than one point. Hence, planets do not twinkle.

Scattering of light is the phenomenon that causes the sky to appear blue. Fine dust in the earth’s atmosphere scatters the sunlight. Out of all the constituent colours of sunlight, blue colour is scattered the most. Thus, the sky appears blue to us.

In a hot day due to rise in temperature, water vapor into the atmosphere which leads to abundant presence of water molecules in atmosphere. These water molecules scatter the colors of other frequencies (other than blue). All such colors of other frequencies reaches our eye and white color appeared to us.