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Scientists expected the sun to enter a period of historic quiet after 2008, when solar activity hit its weakest level on record — instead it reversed course entirely and has been growing more active ever since, in a trend NASA published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters in September 2025
35+ min ago (1720+ words) In 2008, the Sun seemed to be fading into an unusually deep silence. Sunspots had become scarce. By Lachlan Brown · Editorial process Published July 26, 2026 Sunspots had become scarce. The solar wind, the stream of charged particles flowing away from the Sun,…...
When Mariner 4 sent back the first close-up of Mars in 1965, the printer was too slow for the engineers waiting on it, so they pinned the raw numbers to a wall and coloured them in with pastels bought from an art shop down the road
2+ hour, 6+ min ago (409+ words) By Brendan Brown · Editorial process Published July 26, 2026 This is not a metaphor. It is what actually happened. The engineers waiting for the image did not want to wait eight and a half hours. The person who had the idea was…...
How does the closest planet to the Sun, with a surface that hits 430 degrees at noon, hold on to billions of tonnes of ice that never melt?
7+ hour, 35+ min ago (1240+ words) By Lachlan Brown · Editorial process Published July 25, 2026 Mercury is the closest planet to the Sun. On its hottest daytime terrain, the temperature can reach about 430 degrees Celsius. Yet near its poles, billions of tonnes of water ice sit inside craters…...
Most people think the Sun is a vast ball of burning gas, but that familiar picture is quietly wrong: the Sun is plasma, a fourth state of matter — atoms torn into charged particles, the same stuff as lightning and neon
5+ day, 3+ hour ago (674+ words) Understanding the Sun's true nature—as plasma rather than burning gas—reshapes how we grasp stellar physics and the fundamental forces driving our solar system. Published July 21, 2026 Ask most people what the Sun is, and the answer comes fast: a…...
Astronauts on the ISS watch 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets a day, and many say the hardest thing to describe back home is how thin the atmosphere looks from above — a bright blue line you could almost rub out with a thumb
1+ week, 13+ hour ago (363+ words) The International Space Station circles Earth about once every 90 minutes. That orbital rhythm gives its crew roughly 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets in every...
An AI searched nearly 100 million old Hubble images in two and a half days and found 1,300 cosmic oddities — more than 800 of them had never appeared in the scientific literature
1+ week, 8+ hour ago (722+ words) A machine-learning system called AnomalyMatch processed 99.6 million small image cutouts derived from the Hubble Legacy Archive in roughly two and a half...
NASA has calculated, to the precise second, when Voyager 1 will be exactly one light-day from Earth: 2:16 a.m. on 18 November 2026, at a distance of 16,094,799,096 miles — a number that would have been science fiction when the probe launched in 1977
1+ week, 1+ day ago (922+ words) Published July 18, 2026 NASA has reduced one of the strangest milestones in human engineering to a timestamp. On Wednesday, 18 November 2026, at 2:16:07 a.m. PST, Voyager 1 will be 16,094,799,096 miles from Earth. That is not just a large number. It is the distance light travels…...
Every second the Sun destroys a mountain of itself: it fuses hydrogen so furiously that it turns about four million tonnes of its own mass into pure energy each second — and has done so for four and a half billion years.
1+ week, 1+ day ago (271+ words) Start with the number, because it doesn't quite fit in your head. According to a NASA educational resource, "Every second, a star like our Sun converts 4...
The Hubble Space Telescope reached orbit with a mirror ground to the wrong shape by a fraction of a human hair, and astronauts repaired the billion-dollar mistake by effectively giving it glasses
1+ week, 3+ day ago (1018+ words) Hubble’s first images did not look like the beginning of a new era in astronomy. Published July 15, 2026 Hubble’s first images did not look like the beginning of a new era in astronomy. Stars that should have appeared as sharp points…...
The closest star beyond the Sun is only four light-years away, yet at the speed of our fastest spacecraft a journey there would still last longer than recorded human civilization
1+ week, 3+ day ago (751+ words) Four light-years sounds close only because astronomy usually deals in much larger numbers. Proxima Centauri is the nearest known star beyond the Sun, but its...