Cosmic Event

Many young people are first inspired to study the cosmos as a career by looking up at the stars when they are kids. Whether exploring the stars as an amateur or professional, one can find amazing phenomena when staring up at the cosmos. It is possible to see comets, asteroids or supernovas, to name a few.

When looking up into the sky with a telescope, one can see all that outer space has to offer. Planets in this solar system, looking like specks of dust from the earth, suddenly grow visible and lively. Even more amazing is when cosmic events are seen through a telescope. It is possible to see asteroids crashing into distant planets; back in the 1990s, a series of asteroids crashed into Jupiter, creating awesome explosions. Every few years, comets fly by the Earth and create a streak in the night sky. When large stars explode into supernovas, they light up the surrounding sky to hundreds of orders of magnitude of its usual brightness.

With more advanced telescopes and astronomical equipment, one can observe richer stellar phenomena. One might even see black holes emitting x-ray radiation as they swallow up the energy around them. It is possible to watch binary stars rotate around their center of mass, or even witness the movement of the galaxies and observe the red shifting of galaxies as they move away from the one Earth inhabits. Finally, cosmic events that observers can view close to home are solar flares and sunspots, eruptions on the surface of the sun.