England Post-16

Have you ever wondered why stars look different colours? What do these colours mean? How do we know what stars are made of? Explore these questions with our classify a star activity.

Distances to objects in space are very, very large. The nearest star (excluding the Sun), Alpha Centauri, is 41.23 trillion km, or 41,320,000,000,000 km!!

Galaxies are collections of millions, or billions of stars. The Milky Way is the galaxy in which we live, orbiting around it’s centre in a distant spiral arm.

Have you ever wondered how big a galaxy is? They contain millions to billions of stars but what does that really mean for size?

Reading about sizes in a book is one thing, but what if you could make an observation of a galaxy and then measure its size?

Should humans colonise Mars? Is there life in the Universe? Science continually seeks to answer big questions - but it takes a lot of research and communication to come to a consensus. 

Why not host a debate and try it yourself?

Supernovae are exploding stars which increase in brightness very suddenly and unexpectedly.

Star clusters are large groups of stars. These clusters provide fantastic (in fact, out of this world(!)) laboratories for us to study populations of stars.

An exoplanet is a planet which orbits a star that is not our Sun. The first exoplanet was discovered in 1992. It was found in orbit around the pulsar PSR 1257+12.