Pick something you're curious about. Each card gives you a real question to investigate and the best places on the internet to find answers — from NASA to the BBC.
Don't search for a topic — search for a question. "Why do stars explode?" gets better results than "supernovae."
NASA, ESA, and university sites are reliable. Random blogs may not be. Look for authors with real credentials.
The best research topics have unresolved questions. If everyone agrees, there's not much to explore.
The best projects include actual numbers, graphs, or observations — not just descriptions of what happens.
In 2006 the IAU changed the rules for what counts as a planet. Pluto failed one of the three criteria. But not all scientists agreed — the debate is still live.
We've found ice, ancient riverbeds, and possible underground lakes. But liquid water is a very different question. The evidence is genuinely contested.
The Moon stabilises our axial tilt, drives the tides, and slows Earth's spin. Without it, Earth's axis could wobble chaotically — and life would look very different.
A region of spacetime where gravity is so strong that nothing — not even light — can escape. But what's actually inside? That's where physics currently breaks down.
Surprisingly, the most reliable method isn't looking at the Sun itself — it's radioactive dating of the oldest meteorites. The Sun and the solar system formed from the same cloud of gas.
Mass is the deciding factor. Stars like our Sun end as white dwarfs. Massive stars die in spectacular supernova explosions that forge the heavy elements in your body.
When a massive star explodes, the core can collapse to a sphere just 20 km across but containing more mass than the Sun. A teaspoon would weigh a billion tonnes.
The CMB is the afterglow of the Big Bang, light left over from 380,000 years after the universe began. It was discovered accidentally by two engineers trying to fix a noisy antenna.
If the universe is infinite and full of stars, every line of sight should end at one — making the whole sky as bright as the Sun. The fact it isn't tells us something profound about the universe's age and expansion.
Edwin Hubble noticed in 1929 that distant galaxies are moving away from us — and the further away, the faster they recede. His original data is simple enough to analyse yourself.
If dark energy keeps accelerating expansion, stars will burn out, black holes will slowly evaporate, and the universe will reach heat death — maximum entropy where nothing can happen. On a timescale of 10¹⁰⁰ years.
If dark energy increases over time, expansion could eventually overpower gravity, electromagnetism, and even the nuclear force — tearing apart atoms themselves in a finite time.
If there's enough mass, gravity could eventually reverse the expansion and everything could collapse back toward a final singularity — the mirror image of the Big Bang. Current evidence says this is unlikely, but not ruled out.
Most end-of-universe scenarios require protons to eventually decay. We've never observed it happening, but experiments deep underground are watching billions of them constantly, waiting for one to vanish.
JWST sees in infrared, allowing it to peer through dust clouds and see the very first galaxies. The side-by-side comparison images are striking — and they tell you a lot about how telescopes work.
Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 is now over 24 billion km away — and still sending data. The signal takes more than 22 hours to reach us. They've crossed into interstellar space and are humanity's most distant objects.
We went in 1969 with 1960s technology. So why is it taking until the 2020s to go back? The answer involves budget, politics, radiation, and exactly what we're trying to achieve this time.
About 27% of the universe is made of something we can't see, touch, or directly detect — we only know it's there from its gravitational effects. Galaxies would fly apart without it. But we have no idea what it is.
The universe is 13.8 billion years old and contains trillions of stars with planets. Intelligent life should have had time to spread everywhere — so why haven't we heard from anyone?
Einstein predicted gravitational waves in 1916. We only detected them in 2015 — from two black holes that merged over a billion light-years away. The signal lasted 0.2 seconds and stretched space by less than a proton's width.