Harvard astronomer Jonathan McDowell has tracked every object in orbit since 1989 from a personal database — and as Starlink crossed 10,600 active satellites in June 2026, his private catalog became the number governments, reporters, and regulators cite.
Europa, the ice-covered moon of Jupiter, has a problem that turns out to be a clue.
Voyager 1 has been in flight for longer than most of the people on Earth have been alive.
Light leaves the surface of Proxima Centauri and arrives at Earth approximately 4.24 years later.
A coronal mass ejection carries roughly a billion tons of magnetized plasma from the Sun at millions of miles per hour, yet takes one to three days to reach Earth — leaving forecasters a warning window measured in hours, not the years it would take to harden a power grid.
The Cosmic Microwave Background is the oldest light there is, the faint heat left over from the Big Bang, released when the young universe first cooled enough to turn transparent.
For most of the time astronomers have thought seriously about other worlds, the basic numbers were missing.
Voyager 1 is the fastest and most distant object people have ever built. It left Earth in 1977 and, almost half a century later, it is still moving at about 17 kilometres every second, far quicker than any rifle bullet.
The unusual sequence began with a signal from a routine source. On 18 August 2025, the LIGO gravitational wave detectors in the United States and the Virgo…
A minor G1 geomagnetic storm in February 2022 warmed Earth's upper atmosphere just enough to drag 40 newly deployed Starlink satellites back into a fiery reentry within days — the largest single-event satellite loss in Starlink history and a wake-up call for an industry whose forecasting models were built for the wrong customers.
On September 2, 1859, telegraph operators George Wood in Boston and Frederick Royce in Portland unplugged their batteries during the Carrington Event and kept sending messages on the geomagnetic current induced by the storm itself — while elsewhere on the network, sparks jumped from keys and paper tape caught fire.
JWST has caught the galaxy cluster XLSSC 122 bending light from galaxies behind it into long blue-gray arcs, making a dark matter knot visible from a time when the universe was only about 3.3 billion years old.
GJ 504 b, the rosy world that defeated the world's biggest ground telescopes for years, gave up its first spectrum to JWST in a few hours of telescope time. The model that matched the light needed clouds made of salt.
One of the year's most erratic meteor showers is active now. A handful of times it has stunned observers. Most years it barely registers, and the official 2026 calendar predicts nothing unusual.
Measured against the cosmic microwave background, the Local Group moves at about 631 km/s. The motion is a tug-of-war: pulled toward the Great Attractor and Shapley Concentration, and pushed from the Dipole Repeller void, identified in 2017. Why a void can 'push', and what is still being mapped.
Accelerating expansion will eventually push every galaxy beyond the Local Group past the cosmic horizon, erasing the three pillars of Big Bang evidence. As Krauss and Scherrer argued, future astronomers would reasonably conclude they live in a static, eternal galaxy. What that says about what we may have already lost.
