Constellations
Constellations
523 articles in this category.
Constellations
There is a region of space called the Boötes void, around 330 million light years wide and almost completely empty, and if our galaxy sat at its centre, we might not have discovered that other galaxies existed until well into the twentieth century.
Constellations
In the year 1054 a star exploded so brightly that Chinese astronomers recorded it shining in broad daylight for more than three weeks, and the wreckage of that blast is still expanding across the sky today as the Crab Nebula.
Constellations
The surface of the Sun is around 5,500 degrees, but its outer atmosphere is more than a million degrees hotter, and after decades of work physicists still cannot fully explain how the cooler layer heats the one above it.
Constellations
Astronomers have found a cloud of water vapour around a distant quasar holding something like 140 trillion times all the water in Earth's oceans, the largest reservoir of water ever discovered anywhere in the universe.
Constellations
When NASA deliberately crashed Apollo hardware into the Moon, the seismometers left behind recorded vibrations for nearly an hour — as if the Moon itself were ringing like a bell
Constellations
In 1987 a star exploded in a nearby galaxy, and detectors deep underground caught the burst of neutrinos roughly three hours before any telescope on Earth saw the light arrive.
Constellations
New evidence suggests Saturn's rings are younger than the dinosaurs — and for most of the planet's history, the Saturn you picture may never have existed
Constellations
Embedded in the Voyager Golden Record’s Sounds of Earth montage are the brainwaves of Ann Druyan, recorded soon after she fell in love with Carl Sagan — a private meditation on human experience now drifting through interstellar space, waiting for a listener who may never come.
Constellations
The makers of the Voyager Golden Record could not assume an alien would understand minutes or seconds, so the playback speed engraved on its cover is defined against a single, unchanging frequency of the hydrogen atom — a clock written into the physics of the universe.
Constellations
Neptune was found not by anyone scanning the night sky but by mathematics — Urbain Le Verrier noticed Uranus being tugged off its predicted path, worked out where the hidden planet had to be, and astronomers in Berlin who pointed a telescope at that patch of sky found Neptune within a degree of his prediction that same night.
Constellations
When Vera Rubin measured the spin of galaxies, she found their outer stars moving so fast that visible matter alone could not hold them in place — one of the clearest early signs that most of every galaxy is made of something nobody has ever seen.
Constellations
Scientists tracked 8,000 supermassive black holes across the universe and found most slowed their growth over the same 10 billion years — not because of any force acting on them, but because the universe ran low on the cold gas they needed to keep feeding
Constellations
When a young astronomer found a signal pulsing with impossible regularity in 1967, the team only half-jokingly labelled it LGM-1, for little green men — before realising they had discovered a spinning neutron star sweeping a beam past Earth like a lighthouse.
Constellations
When NASA's 77-tonne Skylab station fell out of orbit in 1979 and scattered debris across Western Australia, the Shire of Esperance did the only reasonable thing: it fined the United States $400 for littering.
Constellations