It’s not just about SpaceX and Starlink. What we’re deciding today will have a global impact for years and decades to come. For countless millennia, human beings have gazed up into […]
Search Results
You searched for: Telescope
The most massive nearby stars could be the seeds our supermassive black holes need. The problem with the Universe, as we see it today, is that we only get a snapshot […]
Thomas Baldwin’s Airopaidia (1786) includes the earliest sketches of the earth from a balloon.
We can describe what we see happening, but we don’t understand why. Despite our vast cosmic knowledge, enormous unknowns remain. The quantum fluctuations inherent to space, stretched across the Universe […]
We’ve come fantastically far in our understanding of the distant Universe. Here’s how we’ll go even farther. Sometime in 2021, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope will launch, deploy, and begin science […]
For northern hemisphere skywatchers, it might just be the century’s best comet so far. Every once in a while, large, icy objects pass through the inner Solar System. C/2014 Q2 (Lovejoy) […]
NASA’s New Horizons is the most distant technologically advanced observatory ever. And that makes all the difference. When you look at an object that’s very distant from you, how well […]
Astronomers find these five chapters to be a handy way of conceiving the universe’s incredibly long lifespan.
For the first time in many years, there’s currently a comet visible to the naked eye in Earth’s night sky: comet NEOWISE. For the first time in many years, there’s currently […]
We just found the first one within 1,000 light-years of us. But there’s probably one much, much closer. For a long time, black holes were known to exist only in the […]
A few years ago, the first dark matter-free galaxies were announced, and then immediately disputed. Now, there are too many to ignore.
It could have had any curvature at all. So why is it flat? What is the shape of the Universe? If you had come along before the 1800s, it likely never […]
And how cutting just $1 billion per year in funding from NASA’s budget would be a catastrophe for science. When you think of the great cosmic beyond and what we know […]
In 2006, Pluto was demoted in a very controversial decision. Unless you ignore nearly all of planetary science, it’ll never be one again.
A black hole punched a hole 15 Milky Ways across in a galaxy cluster’s gas, by far the largest ‘kaboom’ ever seen. The Universe, everywhere we look, is full of cataclysmic […]
The Standard Model and General Relativity can’t be all there is. But how will we discover what lies beyond them? One of the biggest problems with physics is that, apart from […]
The strongest tests of curved space are only possible around the lowest-mass black holes of all. One of the most mind-bending concepts about the Universe itself is that gravity isn’t due […]
Help future Mars rovers better navigate the red planet’s treacherous terrain.
Everything else in the universe is either a particle or field. Dark energy behaves as neither, and it may be a property inherent to space itself.
One of NASA’s original great observatories, Spitzer showed us the infrared Universe as never before. On January 30, 2020, NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope was retired after a 17 year mission. Prior […]
The center of the galaxy is mostly obscure in visible light. But thanks to the world’s most powerful infrared telescope, we can see inside. Throughout history, the sight of the Milky […]
On the morning of March 31, 2020, these three worlds will be at their mutual closest in 20 years. For the past few weeks, Mars, Saturn, and Jupiter have all shone […]
The NSF’s new, cutting-edge solar observatory shows us the Sun as never before. Here’s why we need to know. On December 12, 2019, the world’s most powerful solar observatory — the National Science […]
Conjunctions this close are rare, but give humanity an opportunity to view our Solar System’s faintest planet. With eight planets orbiting our Sun, any two will eventually appear close together from […]
The ESO finds another exoplanet that’s definitely not a place for us to go.
Find a clear western horizon after sunset, and this ‘triple treat’ of a dance can be yours. Every once in a while, the night sky provides a spectacular feast for our […]
On Friday, the moon will pass through the Earth’s outer shadow, known as the penumbra.
It’s been precisely 13.8 billion years since the Big Bang occurred. Here’s how we know.
Are the stellar remnants in our cosmic backyard actually our parents and grandparents?
The most massive galaxies lost their star-forming material very early on and never got it back.