Constellations
Constellations
557 articles in this category.
Constellations
In 2025, astronomers discovered Eos, the closest dark molecular cloud ever found — a vast crescent of molecular hydrogen just 300 light-years from Earth. It is so enormous on the sky that, if human eyes could see its ultraviolet glow, it would stretch about 40 times the width of the full Moon.
Constellations
Euclid, the European telescope built to map the dark universe billions of light-years away, spent a single 26-hour stretch staring into the crowded center of the Milky Way and resolved more than 60 million stars, handing NASA's Roman mission a reference map for the planet hunt it begins after launching in late August
Constellations
Just 18 light-years away, astronomers have found one of the best nearby targets in the search for life: a candidate super-Earth called GJ 251 c, sitting in the habitable zone of a red dwarf star. Future giant telescopes may be able to image it directly — and look for clues that it has water, air, or even biology.
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