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Objects like galaxies and nebulae can be ideal subjects if you are thinking of mixing art with science. You can inspire your students by getting them to created amazing images of galaxies or the milky was very easily using watercolors.

Module 4: Beyond our solar system
4.5 “A journey to the Universe puppet show” didactic course
In this last module, we would like to present to you our fourth didactic course called “A journey to the Universe: A puppet show” designed for primary education by Eleftheria Tsourlidaki and Ioanna Kasampa. Like always, you can get the complete didactic course from the link below the brief presentation.

Get the didactic course here.
Marina Molla is a primary teacher of a minority school of Komotini in northeastern Greece.  She combined the didactic course mentioned above with Space Scoops and did a fun activity with her students who created a shadow puppet show and a TV-channel show on space news. In their show, her students talked about famous missions like Cassini-Huygens and Rosetta. They also talked about Black holes, planetary nebulae, photobombing stars, space science vs science fiction, time and space. She shares her experience with us through the video below:

Other activities for students
Living in the Milky Way
What is a constellation?
History of the Universe
Coma cluster of galaxies
How light pollution affects the stars: magnitude readers
Model of a black hole
Black holes in my school
Galaxy classification and formation
Galaxy Zoo

A little bit of art and crafting
Objects like galaxies and nebulae can be ideal subjects if you are thinking of mixing art with science. You can inspire your students by getting them to created amazing images of galaxies or the milky was very easily using watercolors. Here is an example tutorial:

Nebulae in a bottle can also be a fun craft activity for younger students:

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EU Space Awareness Career Interviews: Jorge Vago, Project Scientist // FULL 3 min version

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Interview for the EU Space Awareness Career Hub with Jorge Vago, Project Scientist. Link to the interview profile: http://www.space-awareness.org/en/careers/interview/dr-jorge-vago/

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Engineering is a key pillar in the business of studying the Universe. We could put them all under one name, say “Aerospace Engineers”, but like in astronomy there are many different categories and specializations.

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Studying the origin and evolution of our Universe
the Big Bang
Multiple Universes, dark matter and energy, string theory are some of the concepts cosmologists study.

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Astronomy is a very general term to refer to scientists that study the Universe beyond our planet.
Most astronomers start their studies with a physics or a mathematics degree.  In some cases, it could also be chemistry, biology or another degree. As they go through courses, they get an overview of all these amazing objects that are out there and can later decide what exactly it is they want to do.

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(Subt) Conferencia del Prof. Mark McCaughrean, Centro Europeo de Investigación y Tecnología Espacial

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LISA Pathfinder was launched in December 2015 and set out to detect gravitational waves.

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WST is a NASA mission in collaboration with ESA and the Canadian space Agency. It is scheduled to launch in October 2018 and it will study the history of our Universe. It is the largest telescope ever constructed.

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The Gaia mission, launched in December 2013, aims to produce a 3D map of the Milky Way helping scientists understand its composition formation and evolution. Gaia will make accurate measurements of the positions and motions of around 1% of the total population of stars in our Galaxy.
The full map of 1 billion stars with distances and motions will be released the end of 2017.

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When stars bigger than 8 solar masses come to a point when they can no longer produce energy through fusion the go out with a tremendous explosion and become either neutron stars or black holes.
A white dwarf can also cause a supernova when it’s part of a binary system of stars. The white dwarf will take mass from its companion and when it has accumulated enough mass it will collapse under its own gravity causing a supernova. Supernovae release unforeseen amounts of energy in a very short amount of time, at speeds close to the speed of light.
They enrich the interstellar medium with heavy elements.
Iron is the ultimate form of ash in the Universe. T hat’s because fusion beyond iron is not producing any energy, it requires more energy than it emits.
During supernovae, conditions are so extreme that fusion takes placecreating heavier elements. These heavier elements are also scattered through the interstellar medium during the blast of a supernova. Eventually, over long periods of time, gas and dust that make up new stars and their planets are enriched by these heavier elements that were created during supernovae explosions.

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For stars beyond 20 solar masses.
The gravity in such dying stars is so massive that nothing can stop it. After the star explodes it leaves behind what we call a “Black Hole”. A black hole, has such tremendous gravity that nothing can escape, it not even light.
In other words, the escape velocity* of a black hole is greater than the speed of light.
The area around the black hole were the escape velocity is equal to the speed of light is called the “Event Horizon”. Nothing escapes once it passes that horizon.
Black holes come in different sizes.
Τhey don’t suck all mass around it. Depending on the distance of an object from it, the object can actually orbit a black hole without being sucked in. However, if the object gets close enough, then it can indeed be pulled in by the black hole.
Moon’s gravity affects the Earth and how tidal forces tend to stretch objects.
Gravity can affect space-time. The greater the gravity the slower time passes by. In fact, it slows down so much that at the event horizon it stops completely.

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When stars between 8 and 20 solar masses eventually stop producing energy through fusion, they don’t simply have their core exposed after their outer shell is detached. The phenomena taking place here are so extreme, they cause the star to collapse under its own gravity and explode. What remains is a core that has undergone so many extreme changes that is truly extraordinary. The gravity in the remains of the core of such stars is so huge that it overcomes electron degeneracy (which occurs in white dwarfs) and literally force electrons to smash into protons thus creating neutrons. Very few of them survive. So, what really remains, is a supermassive object made of neutrons with some protons, electrons and element left here and there. These objects also have a thin crust of heavier elements nuclei, like iron and electrons. Imagine something like a gigantic atomic nucleus.
They have a radius of about 20 km and the mass of an entire star.
Neutron stars (also called pulsars) also spin very rapidly (a few times per second) and they emit very accurate pulses.

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Depending on the mass of the star  in some cases, when the outer shell of a star gets blown away, it will form something like a gaseous cloud around the white dwarf that remains.
Radiation emitted by the white dwarf will interact with the gases of the nebula causing it to emit light at different wavelengths.
They come in many different shapes. The reasons behind these shapes can be different, binary stars (two stars orbiting around each other) or planets orbiting the star could be a couple of these reasons.
The gases of the nebulae vary; there is hydrogen but there can also be oxygen, sulfur and nitrogen. These gases emit in different colors of the spectrum. This is also why nebulae have such different colors.
As nebulae came from the blowing away of the stars outer shell, they don’t remain still, they keep expanding.
the size, color and shape of a nebula can tell us a lot about the life and death of the original star.

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Small mass stars (up to 8 solar masses) after going through the phase of red giants and their outer layers get blown away from the core of the star, what remains is basically their naked core.
That naked core  eventually cools down over billions of years and eventually becomes black. The core of the original star is now super dense (about a million  times the density of the sun), hot (about 100.000 degrees) pile of carbon ash roughly the size of the Earth, with incredible gravity.
Normally, a white dwarf has such tremendous gravity, that it would collapse. However, this is not what happens thanks to quantum mechanics.
The more massive the white dwarf, the smaller its size!

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More massive stars, manage to get their core temperature high enough to fuse carbon and heavier elements all the way to iron.

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when stars burn hydrogen in their core they are located in the main sequence of the H-R diagram. When hydrogen stock runs out, the star compresses its core in order to increase its temperature and continue producing energy by fusing helium into carbon. This compression is so abrupt that the outer layers of the star get detached, they start expanding and lose energy fast. This causes the star to get a lot bigger and red. a small star becomes a “Red Giant”.
Red giants can be 10 to 150 times bigger than the initial star. A star like our Sun, when it becomes a red giant will become about 2000 times brighter.

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Astronomers also use a plot of effective temperature (the temperature on a star’s surface) vs. luminosity to map the evolution of stars.

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Astronomers classify stars based on their temperature and their spectra. 

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Astronomers classify stars based on their temperature and their spectra. 

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Big stars are much brighter and they require greater amounts of energy. They use up their fuel much faster than smaller stars and thus they have shorter lifespans.

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Sometimes, that bulge does not have enough mass and not enough temperature to start fusing hydrogen. Such objects are hot enough to emit some radiation but eventually they cool down and become very dark.

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How did stars get to start producing energy in the first place?

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How did stars get to start producing energy in the first place?

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The bright dust areas of galaxies, like the spirals of a spiral galaxy are star nurseries.Stars start to form when gravity pulls together gases and dust into bulges. As more matter is added to that bulge the greater the gravity. Increased gravity will attract even more dust and gas but it will also increase the density and the temperature of the main bulge even more. Eventually temperature will be high enough, to allow the object to start producing energy through hydrogen fusion.

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Overall, the bigger the star the shorter it will leave.

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Overall, the bigger the star the shorter it will leave.

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Although stars may seem eternal compared to our lifetime they do have a finite lifespan. Massive stars, about 150 times bigger than our Sun live a few million years while smaller stars, about 1/10 of our star, for example, are believed to live around 10 trillion years or more. So the first of these objects that were created are still around given that our Universe is ‘only’ 13.8 billion years old. Such small stars are known as “Red dwarfs”. Overall, the bigger the star the shorter it will leave.

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Galaxies are systems of hundreds of billions of stars, with enough gas and dust to make a lot more, all bound together thanks to gravity.
The milky bright band that appears on the night sky  is the galactic disk of our own Galaxy, the “Milky Way”.

Galileo’s time, the first to point his telescope at the night sky,
In the 1920s Edwin Hubble using the largest telescope of that time discovered many galaxies beyond our own.  He categorized galaxies into three main categories; ellipticals, spirals and barred spirals.
Many observations indicate that some galaxies are close enough to interact through the gravitational force. Of course, it takes a tremendous amount of time to see any changes, so to us they seem as if they are standing still. Scientists have developed simulations to view such interactions in “fast forward”.

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Constellations are groups of stars that appear not to be moving relatively to each other on the night sky as we see it and they make up a particular shape. When looking at the night sky we often get the misconception that all the stars we see at night are on the same plane (the celestial sphere).
So constellations may be neighbourhoods of stars when it came to the celestial sphere, but their stars are not really connected to each other.

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Because light has a finite speed!
A photon that was born during the big bang and has travelled 13.8 billion years to reach us, by the time we detect it, it has travelled much further away from us than where it originally was, making the observable Universe much bigger than 13.8 billion light years.Around 45.7 billion light years.
Observations coming from ESA’s Planck space mission which observed cosmic background radiation allowed scientists to calculate the age of the Universe. In 2013, Planck gave us the most detailed map of the Universe ever created!

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Galaxies are the neighbourhoods of stars. They are systems of hundreds of billions of stars.
That is the part of the Universe we can observe.