Constellations
May 2026
Every article published in May 2026. 645 articles · Back to full archive
Constellations
The light hitting your eyes from the sun right now left its surface 8 minutes ago — but the energy behind it may have spent roughly 100,000 years fighting its way out from the core
Earth Observation
There are roughly 170 trillion pieces of plastic floating in the world's oceans, and the satellite work mapping where it concentrates wasn't designed to look for plastic at all
Space Industry
Buzz Aldrin took communion on the surface of the moon before he took his first step on it, and NASA asked him not to mention it on the live broadcast
Climate Science
The Parker Solar Probe is now moving at 430,000 miles per hour, fast enough to cross the continental United States in 20 seconds, and it survives skimming the Sun's corona because a four-and-a-half-inch slab of carbon foam stays at room temperature on the side facing 2,500-degree plasma.
Constellations
The Hubble Space Telescope was nearly blind for its first three years because its primary mirror was ground too flat by 2.2 micrometers, and NASA's reputation depended on a 1993 repair mission built around corrective optics the size of a refrigerator
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