Constellations
Constellations
459 articles in this category.
Constellations
3I/ATLAS is only the third confirmed interstellar object ever detected passing through our solar system. It may be older than the Sun itself, and Webb observations show it is carrying an unusually carbon dioxide-rich coma as it swings past once before leaving for interstellar space forever.
Constellations
Earth quietly picks up tiny second moons from time to time, small asteroids briefly caught by our gravity before they wander off again, which means our planet has carried far more moons than the single one most people ever notice.
Constellations
The first humans on Mars will not just be explorers crossing a red desert. They will be radiation workers, dust-control technicians and weather-watchers on a planet where the danger is less dramatic than constant.
Constellations
The James Webb telescope keeps finding early galaxies that look brighter, bigger and more mature than astronomers expected, forcing researchers to rethink how quickly the first galaxies formed stars and assembled after the Big Bang.
Constellations
In 1959, the Soviet Luna 3 probe swung around the far side of the Moon and took 29 grainy photographs of a hemisphere humans had never seen, then developed the film onboard and scanned the negatives with a flying-spot beam to radio them back across nearly 480,000 kilometres of vacuum
Constellations
There are millions of objects in our own solar system that have never been seen and the facility that will find them is now just months from starting its decade-long survey
Constellations
Parker Solar Probe has flown through the Sun’s outer atmosphere, the corona, where temperatures soar into the millions of degrees even though the visible surface below is far cooler — one of the strangest long-running puzzles in solar physics.
Constellations
An AI trawled through 35 years of Hubble images and found more than 800 strange objects that had never been documented before, showing that one of astronomy’s most famous archives is still hiding discoveries in plain sight
Constellations
Voyager 1, the first human-made craft to enter interstellar space, carries a golden record of Earth’s music and greetings — a message launched into the dark, even though it will not pass near another star for about 40,000 years.
Constellations
We picture the asteroid belt as a dense field of tumbling rock, but the spaces between its objects are so vast that spacecraft can fly straight through it, with the chance of hitting anything almost nil.
Constellations
Mercury is not the hottest planet in the solar system despite sitting closest to the Sun, because Venus traps so much heat under its thick atmosphere that it stays hotter day and night.
Constellations
When Soviet engineers launched the N1 moon rocket from Baikonur in July 1969, it climbed about 200 metres before falling back onto Site 110 and exploding with an estimated seven kilotons of energy, destroying a launch pad in a disaster the USSR kept hidden for two decades
Constellations
In December 1970, the Soviet Venera 7 probe became the first spacecraft to transmit from another planet, sending 23 minutes of faint temperature data from Venus after a torn parachute tipped it onto its side and buried its signal in what engineers first dismissed as tape noise
Constellations
In 2025, NASA quietly opened the commander's seat on private missions to the International Space Station to astronauts who never wore its patch, and the first man in line is Thomas Pesquet, a Frenchman who has commanded the station before and will return in 2027 flying for a California startup
Constellations