Facultad de Ciencia

The article, titled “Analyzing New Planetary Systems at School: Applications of Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation and Kepler’s Third Law,” presents a teaching sequence designed and implemented in Chile. This sequence uses real data from exoplanets to effectively teach concepts of contemporary astrophysics in classrooms.

Scilights are concise summaries written by professional science communicators that highlight the most interesting research published in AIP journals. Their goal is to give global visibility to the findings and bring them to a wider scientific audience.

When we think of galaxies, we often picture them as solitary, spinning disks of stars. However, the reality is far more intricate. Galaxies actually reside in cosmic neighborhoods called galaxy clusters, where hundreds of other galaxies are tightly bound together by gravity. These immense clusters typically feature a dominant central galaxy, which almost always hosts a supermassive black hole at its core.