Constellations
Constellations
557 articles in this category.
Constellations
Europa’s surface is almost too clean. In a Solar System full of impactors, an icy moon should accumulate scars for billions of years — yet Europa has very few. The simplest explanation is also the strangest: the surface we see is young, constantly rewritten by forces rising from beneath the ice.
Constellations
The Cosmic Microwave Background, the faint afterglow of the Big Bang detectable across the sky, contains a strange Cold Spot — a region measurably cooler than its surroundings — and while some physicists have wondered whether it could be the scar of a collision with another universe, others argue it may be a rare statistical fluctuation or the imprint of enormous cosmic structure.
Constellations
For decades, we did not know whether Earth-like worlds were cosmic accidents. But Kepler and TESS have shifted the mystery: small planets are common, and Kepler’s census suggests rocky worlds in the habitable zones of ordinary stars may be common too. If so, the deeper question is not where the planets are — but why, so far, the universe remains quiet.
Constellations
Voyager 1 has been travelling non-stop since 1977, faster than a speeding bullet every second of every day, and it has not yet reached the distance of a single light-year from Earth
Constellations
When JWST looked at XLSSC 122, a galaxy cluster 10.4 billion light-years away, it caught gravity bending light from galaxies about 12 billion years in the past, and a dark matter core packed too tightly for cosmic noon
Constellations
Our galaxy and its neighbours are racing through space at more than two million kilometres an hour, caught in a tug-of-war between the gravity of distant superclusters ahead and a vast, near-empty void shoving us from behind
Constellations
In the far future the expansion of space will carry every other galaxy beyond the reach of our telescopes, leaving the astronomers of that era with an empty sky and no way to ever discover that the Big Bang happened
Constellations
Deep inside Neptune and Uranus the pressure is thought to crush carbon into diamonds, which then sink slowly through the planet as a glittering rain
Constellations
HD 189733b looks deep blue from space, almost Earth-like at first glance — but its colour comes not from oceans, but from silicate particles in a scorching atmosphere where glass may rain sideways through winds of thousands of kilometres an hour.
Constellations
A Venusian day is 243 Earth days long — longer than the planet’s entire 225-day year — and because Venus rotates backwards, the Sun would rise in the west and set in the east, though only once every 117 Earth days through its thick, cloud-choked sky.
Constellations
Enceladus, a tiny Saturnian moon only about 500 kilometres wide, is actively venting water vapour and ice grains into space from a salty ocean hidden beneath its crust — and modelling suggests that ocean may have remained warm and chemically active for geological timescales, perhaps long enough for life to have had a chance to emerge.
Constellations
Mercury was once expected to be far too hot for ice, sitting closest to the Sun — but radar observations revealed bright patches near its poles, and NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft later confirmed that many of them were water ice, preserved inside craters where sunlight never reaches.
Constellations
344 steps stood between the James Webb Space Telescope and total failure — any one could have ended it — and the telescope that survived them all now runs on less power than a household kettle, a million miles from Earth
Constellations
In June 2026, Relativity Space — the rocket company Eric Schmidt took over in 2025, whose one rocket has never reached orbit — said it would privately build and fly a Mars orbiter in 2028, carrying NASA's Aeolus atmospheric instruments and doubling as a communications relay, paid for by a philanthropic backer it has not named
Constellations