Scotland Senior phase

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?

Einstein showed that the speed of light is a universal constant. This means that it always travels at the same speed in a vacuum.

Did you know the Earth is travelling around the Sun at nearly 107,000 kilometres per hour?

Use our simulator to investigate the effect of gravity on other worlds. Then use your measurements and a bit of maths to calculate the strength of gravity in each location across the Solar System!

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.