Constellations
Constellations
569 articles in this category.
Constellations
The North Star is not the brightest star in the sky — not even close: Polaris ranks around 48th, far outshone by Sirius and dozens of others; what makes it special is only that it sits almost over the North Pole
Constellations
Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson spent months at Bell Labs in New Jersey convinced the faint hiss in their antenna was a fault — pigeons, droppings, loose rivets, all ruled out — before a Princeton physicist told them it was the oldest light in the universe, the afterglow of the Big Bang.
Constellations
By mid-2026 a single company, SpaceX, had more than 10,000 Starlink satellites circling the Earth — roughly two of every three active satellites in orbit now belong to one man's network
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.
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.
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
Constellations
James Webb has caught at least five galaxies colliding about 800 million years after the Big Bang, flinging heavy elements out into space far earlier than any model predicted — evidence the early universe was already messy and mature when it should still have been simple
Constellations
On July 10, 2026, China caught the falling first stage of a Long March 10B in a net strung across a ship at sea, becoming only the second nation ever to recover an orbital-class booster, and it now plans to fly the very same stage again before the year is out
Constellations
In May 1986, Leonid Kizim and Vladimir Solovyov left the newly opened Mir, crossed 2,500 kilometres to Salyut 7, and returned carrying 350 to 400 kilograms of instruments — the only human voyage ever made from one space station to another
Constellations
In July 2026, German rocket startup Isar Aerospace signed a Nova Scotia launch-site agreement whose disclosed quarterly fee schedule totals US$112.5 million before per-launch charges, with plans for up to 40 flights a year from a Spectrum rocket that has never reached orbit
Constellations
In 2026, the FCC authorized radio operations for Reflect Orbital’s first 18-metre space mirror, a single demonstration for a proposed 50,000-satellite system that one astronomy model says could raise the natural night-sky background by 200% to 300%
Constellations
We tend to assume life needs a star to begin, but a 2025 study found that some moons carried into deep space by planets expelled during supernova explosions could preserve subsurface oceans for billions of years — heated not by sunlight, but by the repeated gravitational flexing of their orbits.
Constellations
SpaceX has asked to place 100,000 Gen3 satellites into 20 orbital shells split between 323–327.5 and 473–477.5 kilometers above Earth, each weighing up to 2,500 kilograms — more than 200 million kilograms of spacecraft before a single launch vehicle or drop of propellant is counted
Constellations
An exoplanet 124 light-years away may harbour a global ocean beneath a hydrogen-rich atmosphere. Webb has produced two tentative hints of dimethyl sulfide—a gas produced mainly by marine microorganisms on Earth—but independent analyses dispute whether the molecule has been detected at all, leaving scientists divided over what the data mean.
Constellations