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.

Constellations

Titan has rivers, rainfall, lakes and a slow hydrological cycle exactly like Earth’s, except that every drop of it is liquid methane and the rock the rivers run over is water ice

Saturn's moon Titan is the only other world with rivers, rain and seas, built from liquid methane running over water-ice bedrock at minus 179 degrees Celsius.

Jul 10, 2026

Science

A supermassive black hole called RBH-1, weighing at least ten million Suns, appears to have been flung from its galaxy and is now racing through space at nearly 1,000 kilometres per second, leaving a 200,000-light-year wake of newborn stars

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…

Jul 10, 2026

Deep Space

Astronomers believe the Milky Way may contain billions, perhaps even trillions, of rogue planets drifting without close stars — and a 2026 study found one 9,800 light-years away that was likely born in a planetary system before being thrown into the dark

Astronomers have measured both the mass and the distance of a rogue planet for the first time.

Jul 10, 2026

Space Scopes

In July 1962, a single missing hyphen in the guidance code of NASA’s Mariner 1 probe sent it veering off course seconds after launch, forcing range safety officers to destroy a Venus mission that had cost roughly $18 million — a typo Arthur C. Clarke later called the most expensive in history.

{"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

Jul 10, 2026

Constellations

Voyager 1 crossed into interstellar space in 2012 and Voyager 2 followed in 2018, yet both encountered the edge of the heliosphere at almost the same distance from the Sun—121.6 and roughly 119 astronomical units—even though they crossed in different directions and during very different phases of the solar cycle, a similarity Johns Hopkins scientists said they could not yet explain.

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.

Jul 10, 2026

Space Scopes

Brain scans of ISS astronauts show the organ quietly re-weighting its own senses during six months in orbit — turning down the silent inner ear and leaning almost entirely on the eyes to build a world with no down

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.

Jul 9, 2026

Space Scopes

Scott Kelly spent 340 days aboard the ISS, and he has said the leaving was never the hard part — it was the coming back, when the balance and the strange detachment lingered for weeks after splashdown

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.

Jul 9, 2026

Space Scopes

In October 1975, the Soviet Venera 9 probe survived just 53 minutes on the surface of Venus before the 465°C heat and 92-atmosphere pressure crushed it, but in those 53 minutes it sent back the first photograph ever taken from the surface of another planet — grainy, black-and-white, and showing sharp-edged rocks nobody had expected to still be intact.

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.

Jul 9, 2026

Space Travel

About 50 kilometres above Venus’ surface, the crushing heat and pressure below give way to temperatures and air pressure surprisingly close to Earth’s, a region NASA has described as the most Earth-surface-like environment in the solar system — at least by those measures, more forgiving than the surface of Mars.

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.

Jul 8, 2026

Cosmology

We tend to think of the universe as roughly uniform, with galaxies scattered in every direction — but the Boötes Void, discovered in 1981 during a redshift survey, is a vast cosmic underdensity up to 330 million light-years across, containing only a few dozen known galaxies where thousands might otherwise be expected

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.

Jul 7, 2026

Space Scopes

A planet nearly 700 light-years away has mineral clouds that form every morning and completely vanish by nightfall — a daily weather cycle made of rock, confirmed by the James Webb Space Telescope in May 2026

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…

Jul 7, 2026

Deep Space

There is a cliff on a small moon of Uranus that is approximately 20 kilometres from top to bottom, which is roughly 24 times taller than the Burj Khalifa and 11 times deeper than the Grand Canyon, and where a person who fell off the top would take approximately 12 minutes to hit the bottom, at which point the fall might actually be survivable

The visceral test of a claim like this is whether the numbers hold up under examination.

Jul 7, 2026

Space Scopes

A probe called Cassini spent thirteen years orbiting Saturn, flew through the plumes of its moon Enceladus, tasted water and organic molecules in the spray, and then was deliberately crashed into Saturn’s atmosphere in 2017 so it could not contaminate what might be a living ocean

For thirteen years, a spacecraft called Cassini circled Saturn. It flew straight through the icy plumes erupting from the little moon Enceladus, tasted water…

Jul 6, 2026

Science

The Sun accounts for 99.86 percent of all the mass in the entire solar system — meaning that if you took all eight planets, every one of their moons, every asteroid, and every comet, and combined them into a single object, that object would weigh less than one seven-hundredth of the Sun

The specific numerical fact that essentially every high-school astronomy textbook published in the specific interval between approximately 1970 and the present…

Jul 6, 2026

Space Scopes

NASA strapped a helmet called the Apollo Light Flash Moving Emulsion Detector around astronauts’ heads in the dark, and every time a crewman called out a flash, the plates had caught a particle crossing straight through his skull

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.

Jul 6, 2026

Deep Space

The Parker Solar Probe, launched by NASA in 2018, has flown closer to the Sun than any human-made object in history — traveling at more than 430,000 miles per hour with a heat shield that reaches 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit, while the instruments behind it stay at room temperature, protected by four and a half inches of carbon foam

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…

Jul 6, 2026