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Like Science itself, this page is a work in progress!
Use the categories above to jump to different sections on the page. Each bold🛍 entry links to all of our products in that theme, and there are links in the descriptions connect you to external sites to help you 📚 learn more. Enjoy!
Four rocky planets, a ring of asteroids, four gaseous planets, a ring of icy objects, a cloud of distant comets, and one smallish star at the center, is the planetary system we call home. 📚 Learn more about NASA's exploration of the Solar System.
The closest planet to the Sun has an unusually large core, compared to the other rocky planets, and a heavily cratered surface. Did you know that craters on Mercury are named for people who have made significant contributions to the humanities? Learn more about Mercury at NASA.
The most "Earth-like" planet in the Solar System is not very habitable for Earthlings or their spacecraft. Venus has a thick atmosphere of carbon dioxide, but it is often represented by a simulated surface map based on radar observations and other spacecraft data. Learn more about Venus at NASA.
Our beautiful blue marble, our pale blue dot, a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam, is the third planet from the Sun and the only one in the known Universe to have flourishing life.
Earth's Moon is our constant companion, synced in its rotation and orbit so that the same side always faces us as the illuminated half cycles in and out of view. Nearly a quarter of a million miles away (on average), it is the furthest distance humans have traveled from Earth. Learn more about the Moon at NASA.
The most studied planet in the Solar System (apart from Earth), Mars is the destination for dozens of missions, including Viking 1 & 2, the first missions ot land successfully on another planet. Learn more about Mars at NASA.
In a ring between the orbits or Mars and Jupiter are millions of rocky objects adding up to less than the mass of Earth's Moon. These diverse objects give us clues to the formation of the Solar System and maybe even the origins of life on Earth. Learn more about asteroids at NASA.
Despite having been studied by robotic spacecraft for nearly 50 years, the largest planet in the Solar System still harbors cosmic mysteries, including its precise composition, structure, and the source of surface storms like the Great Red Spot and aurorae. Learn more about Jupiter at NASA.
Jupiter's four largest moons – Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto – are named for Galileo Galilei, who first turned a telescope to the sky. Each distinctive world offers intriguing aspects to study, like volcanoes on Io, and a subsurface ocean in Europa. Learn more about Jupiter’s Moons at NASA.
Perhaps the most recognizable planet in the Solar System, Saturn’s iconic icy rings are actually individual particles the size of pebbles to boulders, arranged paper-thin relative to the size of the giant planet. Learn more about Saturn at NASA.
Saturn’s moon Titan is the only one in the Solar System with a substantial atmosphere, mostly nitrogen and 5% methane. Destination of the Huygens probe and NASA’s Dragonfly mission, currently planned for launch in 2026 and landing in 2034. Learn more about Titan at NASA.
Icy giant Uranus spins on its side, likely caused by a collision with an Earth-sized object early in the history of the Solar System, and resulting in extreme, 21-year-long seasons. Methane gas gives Uranus its distinctive blue-green color, and its ring system was discovered in 1977. Learn more about Uranus at NASA.
Learn more about Neptune at NASA.
Learn more about Pluto, Charon, Arrokoth, and the Kuiper Belt at NASA
Learn more about comets at NASA.
Exoplanets are planets in orbit around stars other than our Sun! Learn more about Exoplanet research at NASA.
The Sun is a mass of incandescent gas, a gigantic nuclear furnace, where hydrogen is built into helium at a temperatures of millions of degrees. Did you know that NASA has an entire Division dedicated to studying the Sun? Learn more about the Sun at NASA.
A solar eclipse is the results of the precise alignment of the Sun, Moon, and Earth, resulting in the Sun being blocked by the Moon and the Moon's shadow traversing a narrow path on the Earth for several minutes. During a lunar eclipse, the Earth's shadow dims the Full Moon. Learn more about eclipses at NASA.
As the Moon orbits the Earth, half of it is always illuminated by the Sun. The fraction of the illuminated half that we seen changes over the course of 29.5 days (slightly longer than the 27.3 days it takes the Moon to orbit the Earth, because the Earth is orbiting the Sun as well). We call this cycle of visible illumination the Phases of the Moon: New Moon, Waxing Crescent, First Quarter, Waxing Gibbous, Full Moon, Waning Gibbous, Third (or Last) Quarter, Waning Crescent, then New Moon again. Lean more about Moon Phases at NASA.
Stars are incandescent nuclear engines, fusing light atoms (mainly hydrogen) into heavier elements to release energy. Stars (and their ultimate explosions) are responsible for creating the elements that make planets, and life, possible. Learn more about stars at NASA.
Constellations are figures made based on the positions of bright stars as seen from Earth. Learn more about Constellations from the IAU.
The Universe is revealed from the side of Earth turned away from the Sun. In the night sky we can see the Moon (sometimes visible during the day as well!), planets in the Solar System, stars, occasional comets, and special events like lunar eclipses, meteor showers, northern lights, and more. Learn how to navigate the night sky with free Sky Maps.
The Milky Way is our home galaxy, and what we call the stream of diffuse starlight faintly visible in a ring around the night sky. Learn more about the Milky Way Galaxy at NASA.
"Nebula" is a catch-all term for a cloud of diffuse gas and dust between and surrounding stars. Types of nebulae include dark nebulae, emission nebulae, reflection nebulae, planetary nebulae, and supernova remnants.
Regions of space where stars are forming are often incredibly picturesque because hot young stars illuminate their natal gas and blow away dust, proving glowing backdrops and dark, dense, spires. Learn more about star formation at ESA.
Supernova explosions are the last hurrah of massive stars, leaving behind neutron stars or black holes along with ethereal remnant nebula of their expelled outer layers. Learn more about Supernova from the Chandra X-Ray Center.
Black holes are regions of infinite curvature in the fabric spacetime. It sounds fantastic, but scientists have directly observed a black hole's shadow! Learn more about Black Holes at NASA.
Globular clusters are ancient stellar swarms around the center of the Milky Way Galaxy, where a million stars swirl in all directions, possibly harboring elusive intermediate-mass black holes at their centers. Learn more about Globular Clusters observed by the Hubble Space Telescope.
Galaxies are islands of stars, gas, and dust, likely surrounded by cocoons of dark matter, in the vast sea of the Universe. Learn more about galaxies at NASA.
A new window to studying the Universe opened when scientists at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) discovered the first gravitational waves, ripples in the actual fabric of spacetime that are produced by collisions of massive, compact objects. Learn more about Gravitational Waves at LIGO.
Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation🛍
The Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation is a remnant glow that permeates the Universe, emitted just 380,000 years after the Big Bang. Learn more about the CMBR at ESA.
Telescopes are light-gathering tools essential to the scientific work of observational astronomers. Learn more about telescopes at NASA's Space Place (not just for kids!).
Radio waves are literally the coolest (ha!) part of the electromagnetic spectrum, and radio telescopes collect that light and record it electronically. Learn more about radio telescopes at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory.
Observatories contain telescopes to collect light and instruments to record and/or analyze that light. Learn more about ground-based observatories at the European Southern Observatory and NSF’s National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory.
Learn more about the Electromagnetic Spectrum at NASA.
For 30 years and counting (including five serving missions), the Hubble Space Telescope has orbited Earth every 90 minutes, collecting ultraviolet, visible, and infrared photos with its 2.5-meter-diamter primary mirror and suite of instruments. HST has changed the way astronomers and the public view the Universe. Learn more about the Hubble Space Telescope at NASA.
Named for Indian-American astrophysicist and 1983 Nobel Prize in Physics winner Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory was launched in 1999 to observe the high-energy Universe. Learn more about the Chandra X-Ray Observatory at NASA.
JWST is a collaboration between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA). JWST will allow astronomers to study the Universe from exoplanet atmospheres to the most distant galaxies ever seen. The mission is set to launch in early 2021. Learn more about the James Webb Space Telescope at NASA.
NASA's Kepler Space Telescope and k2 mission surveyed hundreds of thousands of stars in our region of the Milky Way in search of Earth-sized exoplanets from 2009–2018. Learn more about the Kepler Space Telescope and K2 missions at NASA.
NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite is a space telescope mission that is expected discover thousands of exoplanets around nearby stars. TESS launched in April 2018 and is monitoring the brightness of 200,000 stars all over the sky to search for transiting exoplanets.
The Event Horizon Telescope is a world-wide network of radio telescopes, used to create am image of the supermassive black hole in the M87 galaxy. Learn more about the Event Horizon Telescope.
NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft orbited Mercury for an unprecedented four years, studying the chemistry, geology, and magnetism of the closet planet to our Sun. Learn more about the MESSENGER mission at NASA.
Officially known as the Mars Science Laboratory, the rover named Curiosity has been used to study the habitability of Mars since it landed on the red planets in August 2012. Learn more about Mars Curiosity at NASA.
Learn more about the Galileo Mission at NASA.
Launched in 2011, Juno arrived at Jupiter in 2016 and has been studying the planet's atmosphere, gravity, and magnetic fields ever since. The mission is scheduled to last until July 2021. Learn more about the Juno mission at NASA.
NASA's Cassini Mission to Saturn launched in 1997 orbited Saturn from 2004 until 2017, bringing ESA's Huygens probe for its historic landing on January 14, 2005, and making numerous epic discoveries. Learn more about the Cassini mission at NASA.
Learn more about New Horizons mission at NASA.
Learn about the Voyager missions at NASA JPL.
From Sputnik and Explorer 1 to Laika to Yuri to Alan to Valentina to Buzz, Neil, and Michael to Sally to Guion to Mae to Eileen to Chris, Scott, Christina, and more, the history and future of human spaceflight is achieved by countless people willing to dedicate their careers, and often their lives, to exploration.
Scientists are the human beings who pursue the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment (based on OED).
Last, but very much not least, equity and inclusion are foundational to everything that we do at STARtorialist. Equity and inclusion in research and communication means that everyone has equal opportunities to participate in and benefit from science.
