Venus is usually introduced as the planet that makes Mars look gentle. Its surface is hot enough to melt lead, its pressure is comparable to being nearly a kilometre under Earth's ocean, and its clouds are chemically hostile.
On the scale of the whole observable universe, matter is assumed to be spread out fairly evenly: enough galaxies in enough directions that no single patch of sky should look dramatically emptier than any other.
The visceral test of a claim like this is whether the numbers hold up under examination.
For thirteen years, a spacecraft called Cassini circled Saturn. It flew straight through the icy plumes erupting from the little moon Enceladus, tasted water…
The specific numerical fact that essentially every high-school astronomy textbook published in the specific interval between approximately 1970 and the present…
On Apollo 16 and 17, NASA strapped nuclear emulsion plates around astronauts' heads to prove the mysterious light flashes crewmen had been reporting since Apollo 11 were actually cosmic ray particles crossing through their skulls.
At 6:53 a.m. Eastern Standard Time on Tuesday, 24 December 2024 — while most of the American public was busy with Christmas Eve preparations, and while the…
At 7:49 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time on Tuesday, 14 July 2015, the piano-sized robotic spacecraft New Horizons flew past the dwarf planet Pluto at roughly 32,000 miles per hour, at a closest approach distance of 7,800 miles above the surface.
The James Webb Space Telescope has found evidence for thick water-ice clouds high in the atmosphere of Epsilon Indi Ab, one of the closest Jupiter-like worlds we can study directly.
In March 2025, Australia's new SKA-Low telescope took a picture of the sky dotted with 85 galaxies.
Two of the largest reported structures in the distant universe do not just look strange on their own.
Voyager 1, launched in 1977, is now so far from Earth that a radio signal travelling at the speed of light takes more than 22 hours to reach it.
Travel to another star at almost the speed of light and something strange happens to time.
We tend to picture astronauts drifting weightlessly in "zero gravity," as if the pull of the Earth simply stops a few hundred kilometres up.
It is easy to imagine the fastest spacecraft as the one with the most ferocious engine.
Earth can feel like an exception so complete that no statistic should be able to touch it.
