A thin streak of gas and young stars trailing a distant galaxy is the wake of a supermassive black hole moving at close to 1,000 kilometres per second…
Astronomers have measured both the mass and the distance of a rogue planet for the first time.
{"content":"On July 22, 1962, at 09:21:23 UTC, an Atlas-Agena rocket lifted off Launch Complex 12 at Cape Canaveral carrying Mariner 1, the first American spacecraft ever built to reach another pla
The two Voyagers left the Sun's bubble six years apart, in different directions and at opposite ends of the solar cycle, yet found its edge at nearly the same distance. Scientists are not sure why.
Six months on the International Space Station quietly rewires how astronauts sense the world — turning down inner-ear signals gravity has rendered useless, and handing orientation almost entirely to the eyes. Then they come home.
Scott Kelly returned to Earth on 1 March 2016 after 340 days aboard the ISS, and the part he keeps describing in interviews is not the launch or the year in orbit but the weeks afterward — when his balance, his skin, and a strange watching-from-behind-the-eyes detachment took far longer to resolve than anyone expected.
On October 22, 1975, the Soviet Venera 9 probe survived 53 minutes on the Venusian surface before 465°C heat and 92-bar pressure destroyed it — but in that hour it transmitted the first photograph ever taken from the ground of another planet, revealing sharp-edged rocks that overturned every prediction about Venus's surface.
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.
A planet nearly 700 light-years from Earth now has one of the strangest weather forecasts in astronomy: cloudy mornings, clear evenings, and clouds made not of…
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.
