Memunic Chronicles in Atomic Arena

Memunic Space Explorers › Book 12: Memoon and the Biggest Question › Sources and Fact-check Sources and Fact-check Facts and figures in this book were checked on 3 November 2026 against the sources below. Numbers that change with new measurements, such as the expansion rate, are given as values with their uncertainties and the team that measured them. ESA Planck mission and results: cosmos.esa.int/web/planck NASA LAMBDA, the archive for cosmic microwave background data: λ.gsfc.nasa.gov NASA science, universe and Hubble constant pages: science.nasa.gov/universe SH0ES team and the Hubble Space Telescope distance ladder: science.nasa.gov/mission/hubble Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI): desi.lbl.gov International Astronomical Union, naming of celestial objects: iau.org American Meteor Society, Geminids and meteor counting: amsmeteors.org NASA Solar System Exploration, Geminids: science.nasa.gov/solar-system/meteors-meteorites Standard physical constants follow the values pu...

Memunic Space Explorers › Book 12: Memoon and the Biggest Question › For Parents and Teachers For Parents and Teachers What this book does. It follows ten evenings of a sky club and teaches how astronomers read light, measure distance and speed, and reason from evidence to the history of the universe. It is written for a reader who has met algebra, simple graphs and the idea of energy in physics. The ideas of the book are explained in words first. Calculations are shown in full and use only multiplication, division, powers and a calculator. How to use it. Read one chapter at a time. Let the reader try each Space Detective question before looking at the answers. The Try It activities need ordinary household items, and each has a low-resource or cloudy-day alternative. Key ideas to listen for. Light carries information, and spectra act like fingerprints. Redshift and the rubber-band model show space stretching, not galaxies flying through a fixed space. Several independent lines ...

Memunic Space Explorers › Book 12: Memoon and the Biggest Question › Cosmic Researcher Badge and Star-Night Guide Cosmic Researcher Badge and Star-Night Guide Cosmic Researcher Badge and Star- Night Guide Cosmic Researcher badge You have earned the badge when you have done all of these. Written a question you can test. Made a prediction before collecting data. Collected data and written down what you saw, even the surprises. Reported your result with its uncertainty. Said one thing your result cannot tell us. Star-night guide Go with an adult, to a safe place that you know. Wear warm clothes and carry a torch covered with red cellophane or red cloth. Red light protects your night vision. Never shine any torch at another person’s eyes. Give your eyes 15 minutes to adjust. Bring a hot drink, a mat to sit on and your notebook. Leave the place as you found it. Take every bit of litter home. Observing for everyone Sky watching can be done sitting, lying down, from a window, from ...

Memunic Space Explorers › Book 12: Memoon and the Biggest Question › Look Up Tonight Look Up Tonight The Geminids meteor shower peaks on the night of 13 to 14 December 2026. Meteors appear to come from near the constellation Gemini, but they can show up anywhere in the sky. In 2026 the Moon is a thin crescent around then and sets early, so the sky should be dark for most of the night. Check a Moon calendar for your place. Orion rises in the evening in December. Its belt is an easy way to find your way around the winter sky. Aldebaran, Beautine’s star, is the orange eye of Taurus. Follow the line of Orion’s belt up and to the right to find it. Any clear night: try one slow scan of the sky. Count the stars you can see in one small patch, and write the number down. Repeat on another night. Never look at the Sun, and never use a telescope or binoculars to look at it. Meteors and stars are safe to watch with your eyes alone. ← Mistake Museum · Book 12 contents · Cosmic Researcher ...

Memunic Space Explorers › Book 12: Memoon and the Biggest Question › Mistake Museum Mistake Museum Good scientists collect mistakes carefully. Here are some from the book, kept safe so we can learn from them. Exhibit 1: The stars are all the same colour. Not so. Colour tells us about temperature. Cooler stars look redder and hotter stars look bluer. Exhibit 2: The galaxies are flying away from us because we are at the centre. Not so. In the rubber-band model every dot sees the others move away. Space itself is stretching, and no dot is special. Exhibit 3: The big bang was an explosion in space. Not so. It was the stretching of space everywhere, from a hot and dense start. Nobody can point to the place where it happened. Exhibit 4: Dark matter is just dark dust. Ordinary dust would glow in infrared and does not fit the evidence. Dark matter is a name for something we have not yet identified. Exhibit 5: One measurement settles it. Not so. Two careful teams still disagree about ho...

Memunic Space Explorers › Book 12: Memoon and the Biggest Question › Sky Heroes of India and the World Sky Heroes of India and the World Nobody in this book worked alone, and nobody knew everything. These are people whose questions changed what we know. Pierre Janssen studied the total solar eclipse of August 1868 from Guntur, in India. He saw bright lines in the Sun’s light that pointed to a new element, which was later named helium. Henrietta Swan Leavitt measured pulsing stars and found that their brightness is linked to their pulsing time. Her discovery gave astronomers a way to measure distances to other galaxies. Meghnad Saha, an Indian physicist, worked out how heat changes atoms in a star. His idea helps us read a star’s temperature from its light. Cecilia Payne used that idea to show that stars are made mostly of hydrogen and helium. Many experts at first doubted her. The evidence won in the end. Fritz Zwicky and Vera Rubin each noticed that galaxies seem to hold more ...