Today’s session began by investigating how the Earth and Moon were formed. The Earth, like all the other planets in the solar system, started out its life as a disc of dust and gas orbiting the young sun. The dust particles being brought together by the forces of drag to form clumps of rock that grew into what scientists call “planetesimals,” which are tens to hundreds of miles across, and then to Mars-sized “protoplanets” by colliding with each other.

Earth grew to its final size through one last major collision with another Mars-sized object. This last collision, also known as the “moon-forming impact,” was so large that—in addition to adding lots of material to the Earth—there was enough energy to vaporize some of the rock and metal from both the proto-Earth and the impacting object. This vapour formed a disc around the Earth that eventually cooled and clumped together to become the moon. This collision also resulted in the 23.5° tilted axis of the Earth, thus causing the seasons

We moved on to the Dawn mission which was designed to study two large bodies in the asteroid belt in order to answer questions about the formation of the Solar System, and where Earth’s water came from.

We then investigated Gamma-ray bursts, which are extremely energetic events occurring in distant galaxies which represent the brightest and most powerful class of explosion in the universe. These extreme electromagnetic emissions are second only to the Big Bang as the most energetic and luminous phenomenon ever known.

Finally we covered the ELT which is the European Southern Observatory's (ESO) $1.4 billion project to create the next-generation observatory being built in Chile's Cerro Armazones, a mountaintop in the Atacama desert., hoping to start observations in 2028.

Here, the world's largest optical telescope will scan the sky with a primary segmented mirror stretching 128 feet (39 meters) in diameter, roughly four times larger than any current ground-based optical telescope. The large mirror will not only allow the telescope to collect more light, but according to the ESO, the telescope will also provide images 15 times sharper than the Hubble Space Telescope.