Space, science, and the human mind. Since 1995.
Deep Field
A Space Daily column

Deep Field

Astronomy and cosmology

Deep Field covers astronomy and cosmology. Telescopes and what they find, planets near and far, and the strange physics of the deep universe, traced back to the journal papers and observatory data behind the headlines.

Black Holes

The James Webb Space Telescope spent nearly eight hours staring into NGC 4696, a galaxy 145 million light-years away, and watched a river of cool gas pour into an 800-light-year disk spinning at 600 kilometers per second, feeding the supermassive black hole on a self-renewing loop

For the first time, astronomers have watched a supermassive black hole feed itself and then expel its meal in a cosmic cycle that may explain how these monsters grew so rapidly in the early universe.

Space Scopes

In July 1962, a NASA engineer transcribing the Mariner 1 guidance code missed a single overbar above the letter R, and 293 seconds after launch the rocket veered off course over the Atlantic and had to be destroyed — a hyphen-shaped error that Arthur C. Clarke later called the most expensive missing punctuation mark in history

On July 22, 1962, Mariner 1 was destroyed 293 seconds after launch because a single missing symbol in its guidance code — a mark smaller than a grain of rice — sent the rocket chasing phantom course corrections. Arthur C. Clarke called it the most expensive hyphen in history.

Saturn Daily

Titan’s gravity is so weak and its atmosphere so dense that human-powered flight through its sky isn’t science fiction — the same physics that would let a person glide there also lets spacecraft descend onto it more gently than almost anywhere else in the solar system, even though the surface sits nearly 100 degrees Celsius below Antarctica’s coldest recorded temperature

On Titan, the laws of physics conspire to make the impossible routine: humans could pedal through an alien sky while robots descend with ease.