Constellations
May 2026
Every article published in May 2026. 645 articles · Back to full archive
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
The two Voyager probes are slowly running out of power, and the engineers keeping them alive are now making the hardest decisions of the mission: which scientific instruments to switch off next, knowing each command may silence a piece of interstellar science forever.
Constellations
Apollo 11’s guidance software couldn’t be patched at the last minute. It was woven with copper wire by women at Raytheon, where one mistake could mean starting again
Constellations
NASA just put a 30-day clock on a $700 million Mars contract, and the deadline tells you everything about how scared the agency is of losing its relay orbiters before astronauts arrive
Human Behaviour
Europe launches a new mission to image Earth's magnetic shield in 2026 while the operational satellite warning of solar storms is a 1995 spacecraft running 28 years past retirement — the gap between discovery science and operational continuity within a single agency
Psychology
Psychology suggests stargazing might be better for us than we realize
Constellations
What Mars Express just photographed in Shalbatana Vallis isn't just an ancient flood channel — it's the strongest topographic argument yet that Mars once held a real ocean
Human Behaviour
Forty years and multi-tonne xenon detectors have brought dark-matter searches to the 'neutrino fog' without a signal, while a tentative hint surfaces in LIGO data built to listen for colliding black holes — and the pattern of paradigms exhausting themselves into adjacent instruments is older than physics admits
Constellations
Most astronauts who spend more than six months in orbit come home describing the same shift in how they see Earth — and even the ones who were briefed on it in advance say the actual feeling caught them off guard
Constellations
A solar radio burst that should have faded in days kept screaming for three weeks — and the structure feeding it rewrites what counts as a transient event on the Sun
Human Behaviour
A joint European-Chinese magnetosphere mission launches in 2026 — the same year Brussels closes most of its €93.5 billion Horizon Europe programme to Chinese institutions, and the carve-out reveals which knowledge Europe still classifies as 'merely curious'
Human Behaviour
Intuitive Machines is buying a global ground-station network for $49.6 million after landing two probes on their sides — and the sequencing tells you which moats the CLPS contracting model rewards first
Human Behaviour