Little Astronomy

Little Astronomy earns a commission from qualifying Amazon purchases made through links on this page, at no extra cost to you. Quick answer: the best astrophysics book for beginners and non-scientists is Astrophysics for People in a Hurry by Neil deGrasse Tyson. It is about 200 pages in twelve short chapters with no math, and it covers the Big Bang, dark matter, dark energy a...

Little Astronomy earns a commission from qualifying Amazon purchases made through links on this page, at no extra cost to you. The first astronomy textbook I tried to learn from on my own was the wrong one. I was in my twenties, working full time in Ontario, and I borrowed the thickest astrophysics book the library had. By chapter three every page was calculus I had never tak...

Stars form when a cold cloud of gas and dust collapses under its own weight. Dense knots heat up, ignite, and begin to shine. The newborn stars, especially the heavy ones, flood the surrounding gas with ultraviolet light and stellar wind, and that is what makes a stellar nursery glow and carves it into pillars, cavities and cliffs. The ten spectacular star-forming regions bel...

The closest NASA mission to the Sun is Parker Solar Probe. It crossed into the Sun’s outer atmosphere, the corona, in April 2021, and NASA announced that first “touch” in December 2021. On December 24, 2024, it passed 3.8 million miles (6.1 million km) above the solar surface at about 430,000 mph (692,000 km/h), the closest and fastest approach any human-made object has made....

The Mayan zodiac isn’t a wheel of twelve months. It’s the Tzolk’in, a 260-day calendar where your sign is set by the day you were born, so a different sign takes over every 24 hours. Two siblings born a week apart get different signs. Two people born 260 days apart get the same one. That’s the first thing most “Mayan zodiac signs” lists skip. The second is that your sign come...