Constellations
Constellations
561 articles in this category.
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
Water is the most valuable thing in space, not gold, not platinum, not any rare metal — because water can be split into rocket fuel anywhere sunlight reaches, which means the first company to mine it reliably in orbit won't be selling to Earth at all, it will be selling to everyone else going further
Constellations
Jonathan McDowell has been tracking every object in orbit since 1989 — a one-person catalog that started as a weekly email newsletter and became the source governments and newsrooms cite when they need to know how many Starlink satellites are actually up there
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