Constellations
Constellations
522 articles in this category.
Constellations
Astronomers used to assume galaxies formed first and slowly grew the black holes at their centres. But JWST is now finding objects in the early universe where the black hole appears to have arrived first — already enormous before a full galaxy had grown around it.
Constellations
In 2008, Cassini skimmed past Enceladus’s south pole and flew straight through a plume of icy material erupting from cracks in the moon’s surface. The encounter lasted only minutes, but nearly two decades later, data from that flyby is still revealing new organic chemistry from an ocean hidden beneath the ice.
Constellations
The James Webb Space Telescope found a spiral galaxy, nicknamed the Big Wheel, that existed just two billion years after the Big Bang — five times more massive than the Milky Way, with a spiral structure our models say couldn't have survived that early
Constellations
The Roman Space Telescope has the same size mirror as Hubble, but it will survey the sky up to 1,000 times faster — not because it sees deeper, but because it sees wider: each Roman image captures a patch of sky at least 100 times larger, making Hubble’s method look like counting a crowd one face at a time.
Constellations
A moon only 10 kilometres wide was hiding around Uranus for decades. Voyager 2 missed it. Hubble missed it. But in 2025, Webb finally caught the faint speck circling near the planet’s inner rings, raising Uranus’s known moon count to 29.
Constellations
In 2019, Canada launched three radar satellites that can see through Arctic cloud and polar darkness, and now, with the original trio seven years into a seven-year design life, Ottawa has handed MDA Space a C$688 million contract to build the replacement before the constellation starts to fail
Mind & Meaning
In 1610, the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei pointed a small telescope at Jupiter and saw four small objects circling it — becoming the first human being in history to look at the night sky and see, with his own eyes, that the Earth was not the center of everything
Constellations
There is no permanently dark side of the Moon. The far side gets sunlight just like the near side — we simply don’t see it from Earth because the Moon is tidally locked, taking about as long to spin once as it does to orbit us once.
Constellations
In 1995, astronomers aimed the Hubble Space Telescope at a tiny patch of sky that looked almost empty — a dark spot near the Big Dipper no wider than a pinhead held at arm’s length. After 10 days of exposures, the darkness resolved into roughly 3,000 galaxies, hiding in a place where the human eye saw nothing at all.
Constellations
Webb has confirmed a galaxy, MoM-z14, whose light left just 280 million years after the Big Bang, after travelling about 13.5 billion years. The shock was not that one galaxy shone 100 times brighter than expected, but that JWST is finding bright galaxies from this era far more often than pre-Webb models predicted, and MoM-z14 even shows unusual nitrogen enrichment, hinting that star formation and chemical evolution were already moving faster than astronomers expected.
Constellations
In 2004, a magnetar on the far side of the Milky Way unleashed a giant flare so intense it disturbed Earth’s ionosphere from tens of thousands of light-years away — and in just 0.2 seconds released as much energy as the Sun emits in roughly 250,000 years.
Constellations
Water is the most valuable thing in space, not gold, not platinum, not any rare metal — because water can be split into rocket fuel anywhere sunlight reaches, which means the first company to mine it reliably in orbit won't be selling to Earth at all, it will be selling to everyone else going further
Constellations
Jonathan McDowell has been tracking every object in orbit since 1989 — a one-person catalog that started as a weekly email newsletter and became the source governments and newsrooms cite when they need to know how many Starlink satellites are actually up there
Constellations
Europa’s surface is almost too clean. In a Solar System full of impactors, an icy moon should accumulate scars for billions of years — yet Europa has very few. The simplest explanation is also the strangest: the surface we see is young, constantly rewritten by forces rising from beneath the ice.
Constellations