Constellations
May 2026
Every article published in May 2026. 608 articles · Back to full archive
Mars Daily
NASA's Perseverance rover is about to finish its first marathon on Mars, and it's taken the six-wheeled robot more than five years to do it
Constellations
The James Webb Space Telescope is currently observing galaxies that formed 13 billion years ago, and several of them shouldn't exist according to the model cosmologists were using when Webb launched
Mars Daily
A hidden layer of microbial life has been found beneath the Atacama Desert, and it may be the closest Earth can get to rehearsing the search for life on Mars
Constellations
The warmth of the sun on your skin began its journey up to 100,000 years ago — bouncing through the solar interior for almost all of that time before the final 8-minute sprint to Earth, meaning the energy reaching you now started moving when humans were still living in caves.
Space Industry
The International Space Station is travelling at 17,500 mph as you read this, and the astronauts inside it are aging measurably slower than you are
Science
The cells in your eyes that detect light are technically part of your brain, pushed outward during embryonic development, which means when you look at the night sky your brain is physically touching the photons that left distant stars thousands of years ago.
Constellations
Astronomers have spent decades modeling what triggers dwarf nova outbursts — a unique binary with a 1.81-hour orbit just upended their theories
Constellations
A cargo Dragon just flew its sixth mission to the ISS — and the quiet milestone reveals how SpaceX has rewritten the economics of station resupply without anyone making a fuss about it
Human Behaviour
Rubin Observatory will sift 10,000 comets from a decade of nightly sky imagery while Walter Reed left 1,300 facial CT scans unread for five years — the same archival-image problem, solved in one domain and chronic in another
Constellations
The big three carriers just agreed to do something they've never done before — pool spectrum against Starlink — and Gwynne Shotwell's reaction tells you exactly how worried SpaceX actually is
Constellations
The Pentagon is quietly dismantling the agency that built York Space Systems into a contender — and the company's CEO is making a bet that only makes sense if you understand how defense procurement actually rewards the survivors of agency reorgs
Constellations
Saturn's rings are disappearing — NASA estimates they'll be gone within 100 million years — which means we happen to be alive during the brief window of cosmic history when Saturn has rings at all
Science
Greenland sharks can live for more than 400 years — meaning some of the ones swimming the North Atlantic today were alive when Isaac Newton was — and almost all of them spend those centuries functionally blind, navigating the deep ocean with parasites permanently attached to their eyes.
Moon Daily
The moon is moving away from Earth at 3.8 centimetres per year — which means the total solar eclipses humans alive today get to see are something no future civilisation will ever witness
Constellations