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Global reading
Skim Discovered by amateurs and check (√) what it is about.
□ NASA scientists' discoveries in space
□ A new organization for people who are interested in space
□ Space discoveries made by non-professionals
□ How to become an astronaut
Close reading
IDENTIFYING DEFINITIONS
When you read a factual article, look for definitions of topic-specific vocabulary you are
not familiar with. A signal can be a word or phrase, such as or, in other words or that is,
or punctuation, such as a comma, parentheses, or dashes.
Kathryn had found a supernova, or an exploding star.
The star becomes brighter than the rest of its galaxy - a huge system of stars and gases.
1. Scan Discovered by amateurs for signals that point to definitions within the text. Then
complete the sentences with definitions of the words in bold.
1. A supernova - an exploding star - is brighter than its galaxy.
2. A galaxy is defined as _________________.
3. Kathryn is an amateur astronomer; in other words, she is _________________.
4. Uranus was eventually identified as a planet, that is, _________________.
5. Today Pluto is classified as a dwarf (_________________) planet.
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1 Some astronomers spend their entire careers looking for new discoveries in space, but a 10-year-old Canadian girl found one on her first try. In January
2011, Kathryn Gray was looking at recent pictures of outer space and comparing them to pictures taken years earlier. The pictures were just thousands of tiny spots of light but Kathryn spotted a star that looked different in the recent pictures. She knew a lot about space and was excited by what she thought shed found—could it possibly be a supernova?
2 Supernovas, or exploding stars, are a huge event in space. When a star dies, an enormous amount of energy is
released. So much light and radiation is emitted by a supernova that the star
becomes brighter than the rest of its galaxy—an enormous system of stars and gases. Due to their brightness, supernovas become visible through
telescopes. However, it's not easy to find supernovas, nor are they common. The European Space Agency estimates that
in a galaxy the size of the Milky Way, a supernova happens about once every 50 years.
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3 Kathryn immediately went to show her discovery to her father. He too is an amateur astronomer - he is very interested in space but he isn't formally trained in astronomy—so he sent the pictures to a lab, where they were examined by experts. The discovery was confirmed the next day, and Kathryn became the youngest person ever to
discover a supernova.
4 Throughout history, important
discoveries in astronomy have
been made by amateurs. An early example is William Herschel, a musician whose hobby was astronomy. Herschel
discovered Uranus in 1781. Uranus had been observed before, but expert astronomers thought it was a star, not part of our own solar system (a collection of planets and their sun). When Herschel saw it with a telescope he had designed
and built himself, he realized that it was orbiting (moving around) the sun. This meant that Uranus could be classified as a planet. And so, the map of our night sky
was changed forever.
5 Then in 1930, a major discovery was made by a 24-year old farmer's son with no
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college education or formal training in astronomy. In 1928, Clyde Tombaugh had built a homemade telescope using
instructions from an article in a boy's magazine which he used to draw detailed pictures of the surfaces of Mars and Jupiter.
He sent the pictures to Dr. V. M. Slipher at the Lowell Observatory who was so impressed he offered him a job on his team. Within a year,
Tombaugh had discovered a ninth planet, Pluto. It was regarded as a planet for 76 years, but scientists decided in 2006 that Pluto didn't meet all of the criteria for a true planet. It was then classified as a dwarf, or small, planet.
6 John Dobson is considered to be one of the most influential amateur astronomers because he enabled so many others to take up astronomy as a hobby. In 1956, he built a powerful telescope out of low-cost materials, such as paper tubes used in construction. With affordable tools like Dobson's telescope, more amateurs today have the technology that is needed to make significant discoveries of their own.
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