What Celestial Body are You?

The moon is our closest neighbor just 385,000 km (240,000 mi) away, which is actually pretty close. Our moon is the fifth largest moon in the solar system and is the reason we have tides. The leading theory explaining how the moon was formed is the Giant Impact hypothesis. This says that a smaller Earth and our Earth collided and left the moon as debris.

Europa is the smallest of the 4 Galilean moons, but holds the highest chance for life. The outer crust of Europa is water-ice with a liquid ocean underneath. Fun fact: Europa has the smoothest surface of any known solid object in our solar system.

Comets are the "dirt snowball" of space. They are mostly ice with some rock and dust mixed in. Comets come from the Oort cloud which surrounds our solar system. As they begin to fall in towards the sun from the Oort cloud, the sun blows off their outer layer which falls behind and leaves the classic trail we see.

A star is a hot, glowing ball of gasses held together by its own gravity. Stars are found in every galaxy and every corner of the universe. The reason they glow is because there is so much pressure in their core that hydrogen atoms fuse together. This is equivalent to a bunch of tiny bombs going off in the middle of a star.

Home, sweet home. Earth was formed about 4.5 billion years ago from a disk of gas surrounding our sun, at least that is the leading theory. Life began to form on the planet within the first 1 billion years of its existence and has since evolved into the organisms we see today.

Jupiter is the largest planet in our solar system. It is mostly gaseous hydrogen and helium but turns into a sea of liquid hydrogen deep in the atmosphere. Because of this, Jupiter has the largest ocean in the universe, except it is hydrogen and not water. Jupiter also has over 50 moons and three rings, but they are much smaller than Saturn's.

A black hole is a point in space of immense gravity. It is so strong that not even light can escape past a point called the even horizon. Scientists think the smallest black hole is only one atom while the largest can have a mass equal to 4 million times our sun. They are formed when a star larger than our sun explodes and dies leaving behind the black hole.

A white dwarf is the core of a dead star around the size of our sun. The body is so dense that one teaspoon of a white dwarf would weigh 15 tons. All of the atoms are squished together so tightly that even the electrons are next to each other. According to the Pauli exclusion principle, this shouldn't happen.