Constellations
Constellations
556 articles in this category.
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
Titan has rivers, rainfall, lakes and a slow hydrological cycle exactly like Earth's, except that every drop of it is liquid methane and the rock the rivers run over is water ice
Constellations
Voyager 1 crossed into interstellar space in 2012 and Voyager 2 followed in 2018, yet both encountered the edge of the heliosphere at almost the same distance from the Sun—121.6 and roughly 119 astronomical units—even though they crossed in different directions and during very different phases of the solar cycle, a similarity Johns Hopkins scientists said they could not yet explain.
Constellations
James Webb has found evidence for thick water-ice clouds on Epsilon Indi Ab, one of the closest Jupiter-like worlds we can study directly — a discovery that didn’t overturn every atmospheric model, but exposed how many of them had been leaving out the very thing now shaping the planet’s sky.
Constellations
In March 2025, Australia's new SKA-Low telescope photographed 85 galaxies using just 1,024 of its planned 131,072 antennas — less than one percent of its full power, and the image was already beyond what scientists hoped for
Constellations
Two enormous structures — the Giant Arc and the Big Ring — appear in the same region of deep space at the same cosmic distance, a pairing so unexpected that Alexia Lopez, one of the astronomers who discovered them, says current cosmology struggles to explain even one of them, let alone both together.
Constellations
The Voyager 1 probe, launched in 1977, is now so far from Earth that a radio signal travelling at the speed of light takes over 22 hours to reach it, and it is still sending data back from interstellar space on a power source the size of a car battery
Constellations
If you could travel to another star system at almost the speed of light, you might age only a few years on the journey — while the people you left behind could age by generations, or even be gone for centuries.
Constellations
A galaxy confirmed this January formed just 290 million years after the Big Bang, and the part astronomers cannot explain is that it is far too large, far too soon, as if the early universe was building things it was not supposed to be able to build yet.
Constellations
On April 1 this year, four astronauts left Earth on humanity’s first crewed lunar mission since 1972, and by April 6 they had flown farther from home than any humans in history — returning with the strange perspective astronauts have described for decades, where Earth stops looking like a place and starts looking like something impossibly fragile.
Constellations
Titan is the only world besides Earth known to have rivers, lakes, seas, clouds and rain — except its “water” is methane and ethane, flowing across a surface frozen to minus 179 degrees Celsius. And in June 2026, scientists held the first Humans to Titan Summit, beginning to map what a crewed mission to Saturn’s largest moon would actually require.
Constellations
Scientists assumed every cave on Mars formed from ancient lava, but a team from Shenzhen University has now found eight that water carved through soluble rock — a process never before confirmed on the Red Planet
Constellations
Scientists expected Pluto to be a frozen, ancient world scarred by billions of years of impacts. But when New Horizons finally arrived in 2015, it found something stranger: smooth young plains with almost no craters, signs of flowing nitrogen ice, possible ice volcanoes, and a layered blue haze in an atmosphere no one expected to look so complex
Constellations
Carl Sagan spent years trying to persuade NASA to take a picture many saw as scientifically pointless: Earth from more than 6 billion kilometres away, reduced to a pale blue dot smaller than a pixel. Voyager 1 finally captured it in 1990 — and that tiny speck became one of the most haunting images in human history.
Constellations