A small body moving in the solar system that would become a meteor if it entered the earth's atmosphere A meteor

that survives its passage through the earth's atmosphere such that part of it strikes the ground. More than 90 percent of meteorites are of rock, while the remainder consist wholly or partly of iron and nickel A celestial object consisting of a nucleus of ice and dust and, when near the sun, a tail of gas and dust particles pointing away from the sun A spherical cloud of small rocky and icy bodies postulated to orbit the sun beyond the orbit of Pluto and up to 1.5 light years from the sun, and to be the source of comets. Its existence was proposed by J. H. Oort A diffuse cloud of gas and dust surrounding the nucleus of a comet The continuous flow of charged particles from the sun that permeates the solar system A unit of astronomical distance equivalent to the distance that light travels in one year, which is 9.4607 1012 km (nearly 6 trillion miles) A great circle on the celestial sphere representing the sun's apparent path during the year, so called because lunar and solar eclipses can occur only when the moon crosses it A group of stars forming a recognizable pattern that is traditionally named after its apparent form or identified with a mythological figure. Modern astronomers divide the sky into eighty-eight constellations with defined boundaries The distance of a point east of the First Point of Aries, measured along the celestial equator and expressed in hours, minutes, and seconds The angular distance of a point north or south of the celestial equator A fixed luminous point in the night sky that is a large, remote incandescent body like the sun The third brightest star in the sky, in the constellation Centaurs, visible only to observers in the southern hemisphere. It is the nearest bright star to the solar system (distance 4.34 light years), and is a visual binary A very large star of high luminosity and low surface temperature. Red giants are thought to be in a late stage of evolution when no hydrogen remains in the core to fuel nuclear fusion A small very dense star that is typically the size of a planet. A white dwarf is formed when a low-mass star has exhausted all its central nuclear fuel and lost its outer layers as a planetary nebula A star that suddenly increases greatly in brightness because of a catastrophic explosion that ejects most of its mass A celestial object of a very small radius and a very high density, with closely packed neutrons. Neutron stars are thought to form by the gravitational collapse of a massive star after a supernova explosion, provided that the star is insufficiently massive to produce a black hole A celestial object, thought to be a rapidly rotating neutron star that emits regular pulses of radio waves and other electromagnetic radiation at rates of up to one thousand pulses per second A system of millions or billions of stars, together with gas and dust, held together by gravitational attraction A region of space having a gravitational field so intense that no matter or radiation can escape A massive and extremely remote celestial object, emitting exceptionally large amounts of energy, and typically having a starlike image in a telescope. It has been suggested that quasars contain massive black holes and may represent a stage in the evolution of some galaxies A large compact spherical star cluster, typically of old stars in the outer regions of a galaxy A faint band of light crossing the sky, made up of vast numbers of faint stars. It corresponds to the plane of our Galaxy, in which most of its stars are located