Space Is the Place: A Galaxy of Far Out Words: Oh, My Stars! The Language of Outer Space

If you like science or science fiction, or hope to go into space one day, this list is essential vocabulary. Don't space out — learn these words!
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Full list of words from this list:

words only definitions & notes
  1. astral
    being or relating to or resembling or emanating from stars
    That show is also set in Earth’s far future, with humans rapidly traveling from planet to planet via astral gates. The Verge (Aug 30, 2019)
    Aster means "star" in Greek.
  2. black hole
    a region of space resulting from the collapse of a star
    “I used to think of science as a refuge” So for example, people get really excited about being able to see a black hole, and that is terrific. The Verge (Jul 24, 2020)
  3. celestial
    relating to or inhabiting a divine heaven
    He searched the data for the celestial equivalent of a photobomb, looking for distant solar system objects that just happened to get in the way of the camera. The Guardian (Jun 28, 2020)
  4. comet
    a small frozen mass that travels around the sun
    Earnest specialized in nighttime photography, and The Associated Press recently published a photo he’d taken of the comet Neowise above Colorado National Monument. Seattle Times (Jul 24, 2020)
    Aster kometes means "long-haired star" in Greek, and that's a pretty good description for comets, with their long tails of ice crystals.
  5. corona
    the outermost region of the sun's atmosphere
    It will fly within four million miles of the sun’s surface, allowing direct measurements of the corona and other solar regions. New York Times (Jul 16, 2020)
    A word with strong negative associations these days, corona just means "crown" in Latin. That's why it's used to describe the round virus with protruding spikes. It's also the part of the sun that's still visible during a full solar eclipse.
  6. cosmology
    metaphysical study of the origin and nature of the universe
    The European Space Agency’s Planck telescope mapped the entire CMB sky from 2009 to 2013 with unprecedented precision, and that data is considered the gold standard of CMB cosmology. Nature (Jul 14, 2020)
  7. cosmos
    the universe considered as a whole
    According to the prevailing theory of a confoundingly preposterous universe, the cosmos contains about five times as much invisible dark matter as luminous atomic matter. New York Times (Jul 10, 2020)
    Kosmos is Greek for "universe."
  8. galaxy
    a collection of star systems
    More than 2 billion galaxies and quasars were measured for the project, spanning 11 billion years of cosmic time. Fox News (Jul 23, 2020)
    The Milky Way gets its name from the Ancient Greek Galaxias Kiklos, literally meaning "the milky circle."
  9. gravity
    the force of attraction between all masses in the universe
    But the Russian rocket that was carrying both spacecraft malfunctioned not long after launch, and it couldn’t escape our planet’s gravity. New York Times (Jul 22, 2020)
  10. interstellar
    between or among stars
    The cosmic interloper was first thought to be an interstellar asteroid, a chunk of rock shed by another star system. New York Times (Jun 15, 2020)
  11. nebula
    an immense cloud of gas and dust in interstellar space
    A nebula is a giant cloud of dust and gas in space. BBC (Apr 24, 2020)
    Nebula is Latin for "fog" or "mist."
  12. pulsar
    a degenerate neutron star that emits polarized radiation
    A “day” on a pulsar lasts only a few milliseconds, so the stars would rise and set hundreds of times per second, moving too fast for your eye to perceive their motion. New York Times (Apr 7, 2020)
    Pulsars are dead stars that spin rapidly, emitting powerful radiation that reads as bursts — or pulses, if you will — to an observer on Earth.
  13. quasar
    a starlike object that may send out radio waves
    Graham and his team study really active supermassive black holes in galaxies — known as quasars — and they’d been noticing a weird trend. The Verge (Jun 25, 2020)
    Quasars are also known as "quasi-stellar objects" and are huge, starlike clusters at the center of galaxies thought to contain supermassive black holes.
  14. stellar
    being or relating to or resembling or emanating from stars
    Yet despite its stellar host’s resemblance to our own, the snapshots of this planetary system reveal it to be no place like home. Scientific American (Jul 24, 2020)
    Stella is "star" in Latin.
  15. supernova
    a star that explodes and becomes luminous in the process
    A supernova is a powerful explosion that occurs when some stars reach the ends of their lives; in this case, the blast was not sufficient to destroy it. BBC (Jul 15, 2020)
  16. universe
    everything that exists anywhere
    The map reveals the "filaments and voids" in the structure in the universe, starting from a point when the universe was only about 300,000 years old. Fox News (Jul 23, 2020)
  17. vacuum
    an empty area or space
    But before all that, there is the small matter of getting Hayabusa2’s precious cargo down from the harsh vacuum of space and safely into scientists’ hands. Scientific American (Jul 23, 2020)
    Vacuum is Latin, from the verb vacuus, meaning "empty."
Created on Sat Jun 27 16:29:59 EDT 2020 (updated Sun Aug 09 20:18:44 EDT 2020)

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