Constellations
Constellations
562 articles in this category.
Constellations
Neptune was found not by anyone scanning the night sky but by mathematics — Urbain Le Verrier noticed Uranus being tugged off its predicted path, worked out where the hidden planet had to be, and astronomers in Berlin who pointed a telescope at that patch of sky found Neptune within a degree of his prediction that same night.
Constellations
When Vera Rubin measured the spin of galaxies, she found their outer stars moving so fast that visible matter alone could not hold them in place — one of the clearest early signs that most of every galaxy is made of something nobody has ever seen.
Constellations
Scientists tracked 8,000 supermassive black holes across the universe and found most slowed their growth over the same 10 billion years — not because of any force acting on them, but because the universe ran low on the cold gas they needed to keep feeding
Constellations
When a young astronomer found a signal pulsing with impossible regularity in 1967, the team only half-jokingly labelled it LGM-1, for little green men — before realising they had discovered a spinning neutron star sweeping a beam past Earth like a lighthouse.
Constellations
When NASA's 77-tonne Skylab station fell out of orbit in 1979 and scattered debris across Western Australia, the Shire of Esperance did the only reasonable thing: it fined the United States $400 for littering.
Constellations
When the Galileo spacecraft's main antenna failed to unfurl on the way to Jupiter, engineers salvaged the mission by rewriting its software across deep space, compressing its data and squeezing a flagship science return through a low-gain antenna never meant to carry it.
Constellations
Ayisha Ashruf and her colleagues at Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre tracked seventeen pieces of 1960s-era space junk for 36 years and found that once the Sun's sunspot count climbs past roughly two-thirds of a cycle's peak, the upper atmosphere starts pulling debris down noticeably faster
Constellations
Two radio astronomers spent months trying to eliminate a faint hiss in their antenna, even scrubbing out pigeon droppings, before realising the noise they couldn’t get rid of was the afterglow of the early universe — the cosmic microwave background left behind by the Big Bang.
Constellations
In 1998 ground controllers lost contact with the Sun-watching SOHO spacecraft and feared it might be gone for good, until the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico pinged the silent, slowly tumbling craft — beginning a months-long effort to coax it back to life.
Constellations
The Milky Way's central black hole is almost silent today, but a collision with the Large Magellanic Cloud could feed it enough gas to wake it up — roughly two billion years from now
Constellations
For decades two spacecraft drifting out of the solar system were being nudged off course by a force no one could explain — until physicists traced it to the faint heat radiating from the probes themselves.
Constellations
A 36-year sweep of orbital debris has found the solar threshold where Earth’s upper atmosphere starts pulling space junk down faster, just as mega-constellations crowd low orbit
Constellations
In 1995, NASA’s Galileo spacecraft sent a probe into Jupiter’s atmosphere that kept transmitting for just 58 minutes as it fell, returning the first direct readings from inside the giant planet before rising heat and pressure silenced it for good
Constellations
A meteorite that fell near the Australian town of Murchison in 1969 was found to contain grains of stardust up to around 7 billion years old — the oldest solid material ever identified on Earth, formed long before the Sun or planets existed.
Constellations