Object in space
Draw a planet, moon, star or nebula - with a line on what makes it interesting.
Runs locally in your browser. Nothing you generate is ever sent to a server.
Press "Generate" to see a result here.
Type
Press Generate and something from space comes up with a line explaining what it is - a planet, a moon, a nebula, or an event like a meteor shower. The list stays with objects that are genuinely worth reading about rather than trying to be a catalogue.
The reclassification in 2006 was not about size. The definition adopted then requires a planet to orbit the Sun, be round under its own gravity, and have cleared other objects out of its orbital neighbourhood. Pluto meets the first two and fails the third - it shares the Kuiper belt with many similar bodies, one of which, Eris, is more massive. Both are listed here under dwarf planets.
Europa has more liquid water than Earth does, under a shell of ice. Io is the most volcanically active place in the solar system. Titan has weather, rivers and lakes, though of methane rather than water. Filtering to moons is a good way to find a research topic that has not already been done by three other people in the class.
Drawing at random is the simplest way to hand out research subjects without argument, and it has a side benefit: nobody ends up with the obvious choice they would have picked anyway. The line under each result is enough to start a search from.
The list is filtered to the group you chose, then an object is drawn using your browser's cryptographic random source with rejection sampling, so nothing is favoured. Batches without repeats use a Fisher-Yates shuffle driven by the same source.
Press Generate and one comes up with a short line on what it is.
Yes. The filter covers planets, moons, dwarf planets, stars, deep sky objects, and other phenomena like eclipses and comets.
Because in 2006 the definition of a planet was tightened to require clearing the neighbourhood of its orbit. Pluto shares its region with many other Kuiper belt objects, so it was reclassified as a dwarf planet.
Yes. Drawing an object at random is a fair way to assign research topics, and each result comes with enough to start searching from.
Yes. Set the quantity and press once, then Copy All to take the whole list with descriptions.
Yes. Each object is drawn with your browser's cryptographic random source, so everything in the chosen group has an equal chance.