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.

Outer Planets

Juno survives repeated dives through Jupiter’s lethal radiation belts by hiding its electronic brain inside a 180-kilogram titanium vault — because an ordinary spacecraft computer would quickly fail in the storm of high-energy particles

Juno's survival at Jupiter is not just a triumph of navigation. It is a triumph of hiding.

Jul 14, 2026

Deep Space

When Voyager 1 launched in 1977, each of its main computer systems had less than 70 kilobytes of memory — smaller than a typical phone photo — and that 1970s hardware is still carrying out commands from Earth nearly five decades later

The most distant object humans have ever built runs on computers with less memory than a typical phone photograph.

Jul 14, 2026

Cosmology

Most of every galaxy is made of matter nobody has ever seen, detected, or explained — and the clearest early proof came from an astronomer named Vera Rubin, who simply measured how fast the outer stars of galaxies were spinning

Most of the matter associated with galaxies is not in the stars, gas, dust, planets, or black holes that telescopes can see.

Jul 14, 2026

Deep Space

New Horizons flew past Pluto so quickly that an encounter nine years in the making was effectively over within hours — but the data gathered during that brief passage took another 15 months to trickle home

The New Horizons encounter with Pluto was one of the strangest bargains in modern exploration.

Jul 14, 2026

Deep Space

Voyager’s signal now reaches Earth as a whisper measured in fractions of a billionth of a watt, fainter than almost anything our antennas were built to hear

Voyager is not loud anymore. It never really was. The spacecraft carries a transmitter with roughly the power of a household light bulb, and that signal has…

Jul 13, 2026

Deep Space

Astronomers have found a super-Earth just 25 light-years away — close enough by cosmic standards that it sits in the small category of worlds scientists consider genuinely worth searching for signs of life

Imagine standing on a shoreline where the sea is calm, the light is the deep red of a dying ember, and the sky feels close enough to touch.

Jul 13, 2026

Outer Planets

Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons, is sealed beneath a shell of ice, but the ocean hidden below may contain twice as much liquid water as every ocean on Earth combined — and Jupiter’s gravity may have kept it liquid for billions of years

Europa looks, at first, like a frozen world that should be finished. It orbits far from the Sun, locked in the cold outer Solar System, its surface crossed by long reddish fractures and pale plains of ice.

Jul 13, 2026

Exo Worlds

The most common type of planet discovered in the Milky Way may be a world that does not exist in our solar system — larger than Earth, smaller than Neptune, and wrapped in an atmosphere we barely understand

The Solar System gives us a familiar catalogue of planets: small rocky worlds close to the Sun, then gas and ice giants farther out.

Jul 13, 2026

Solar Science

Light from the Sun takes about eight minutes to reach Earth, but the energy inside a single photon can spend tens of thousands of years bouncing through the Sun’s dense core before it ever escapes the surface to begin that eight-minute trip

Sunlight takes 8 minutes and 20 seconds to reach Earth from the solar surface. But the energy inside each photon spent tens of thousands of years pinballing through the Sun's core before it ever got out — a random walk through matter thirteen times denser than lead.

Jul 13, 2026

Stellar Chemistry

Scientists examining samples returned from asteroid Bennu found ribose and glucose inside — and with phosphate and every RNA nucleobase already detected in the same asteroid material, every chemical component needed to build RNA was present in the early solar system, long before life existed on Earth.

The Bennu sample is becoming less like a single asteroid story and more like a chemistry inventory from the early solar system.

Jul 13, 2026

Exo Worlds

A red dwarf star called TRAPPIST-1, just 40 light-years from Earth, hosts seven Earth-sized planets — including three orbiting in the narrow zone where liquid water could potentially survive

TRAPPIST-1 is not impressive by the usual standards of stargazing. It is too faint to see with the naked eye, far cooler and smaller than the Sun, and located about 40 light-years away in the direction of Aquarius.

Jul 12, 2026

Venusian Heat

Venus turns so slowly that a single day there lasts longer than its entire year, and it spins backwards, so from its surface the Sun would rise in the west.

The simplest way to make Venus feel strange is not to begin with its heat, its pressure, or its acid clouds.

Jul 12, 2026

Constellations

In July 1969, weeks before Apollo 11 launched, a NASA engineer named Jack Garman handwrote a list of every alarm code the Apollo Guidance Computer could throw and placed it under the plexiglass on his console — and when Margaret Hamilton’s software triggered a 1202 alarm during the lunar descent with roughly 1,800 metres to go, that scrap of paper kept Mission Control from aborting the landing.

How a 24-year-old NASA engineer's handwritten alarm-code cheat sheet, taped to a Mission Control console three days before Apollo 11 launched, kept the first lunar landing from being aborted at 1,800 metres.

Jul 12, 2026

Constellations

When Italian and German researchers modeled a square-meter array of 1,482 neodymium magnets, the simulation showed roughly a fifth of incoming low-energy solar protons being deflected — suggesting a potential way for deep-space crews to reduce some of the mass they currently carry for radiation shielding.

When Italian and German researchers modeled a square-meter array of 1,482 neodymium magnets, the simulation showed roughly a fifth of incoming low-energy solar protons being deflected — without any power supply, cryogenic cooling, or moving parts.

Jul 12, 2026

Outer Planets

The discovery at the Solar System’s frozen edge that deepened a long-running astronomical puzzle, casting new doubt on ‘Planet Nine’ — the giant, unseen world some astronomers believe is quietly tugging at the most distant orbits

A small icy world found far beyond Pluto has made the case for some proposed versions of Planet Nine look weaker, not stronger.

Jul 12, 2026

Constellations

Nearly a millennium ago sky-watchers recorded a new star so bright it was visible in daylight for weeks, and Hubble has now traced how far its remnant, the Crab Nebula, has expanded since — a thousand-year-old explosion still visibly unfolding

In July 1054, court astronomers in China recorded a new "guest star" near Tianguan, the star we now call Zeta Tauri.

Jul 12, 2026