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| WORD | MEANING | EXTRA INFORMATION |
| Barnard, Edward Emerson | American astonomer. Discovered Jupiter's moon Amalthea and the fourth nearest star to Earth, known as Barnard's Star (see below). Lived from 1857 - 1923. | |
| Barnard's Star | Fourth nearest star to Earth. 5.9 light years away. | |
| Belinda | Moon of Uranus. Discovered in 1986 by Voyager 2., approx 80km in diameter, 10th moon is distance from Uranus. | In literature, Belinda was the heroine in Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock. |
| Billion | The American version of billion is one thousand million and is written as 1,000,000,000. The English version is one million million and is written 1,000,000,000,000. Scientists generally use the American version, or to avoid confusion, don't use billion at all and keep to scientific notation. | |
| Black Hole | The core of a collapsed star. Its gravity is so strong that not even light can escape. | |
| Bode, Johann Elert | German astronomer, mostly known for "Bode's Law" (see below). Lived from 1747 to 1826. | |
| Bode's Law | A mathematical formula designed by Bode to generate the orbits of objects orbiting the Sun in A.U. Although it appears to be accurate for the planets (including the asteroid belt) up to Uranus (it actually predicted Uranus' orbit before it was discovered), it seems to go wrong after that and misses out Neptune. The law appears to back-up theories about how Solar Systems are formed (the distances between planets roughly doubles the further you move out of the Solar System) and it is more coincidental that the positions of objects up to Uranus fit in with Bode's Law. | HOW IT WORKS:
Write down the sequence below. 0, 3, 6, 12, 24, 48, 96, 192, ... and then add 4 to each number 4, 7, 10, 16, 28, 52, 100, 196, ... then divide by 10 to give the distances of the planets in A.U. 0.4 (Mercury), 0.7 (Venus), 1.0 (Earth), 1.6 (Mars), 2.8 (Asteroid Belt) 5.2 (Jupiter) ,10 (Saturn), 19.6 (Uranus) |
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