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In 1995 astronomers aimed Hubble at a patch of sky so dark it seemed a waste of ten precious days: the picture came back swarming with about 3,000 galaxies, each a city of stars, in a speck the size of a grain of sand held at arm's length.
17+ hour, 22+ min ago (357+ words) In December 1995, Robert Williams, then director of the Space Telescope Science Institute, used a significant share of his discretionary Hubble time for an...
There's a stretch of desert in Chile so dry that a single rain event turned up in four years of instrument records, and its soil fools life-detection hardware in precisely the way Mars does, so NASA spent four field seasons rehearsing a rover mission on it
19+ hour, 34+ min ago (123+ words) Before NASA could search for life on Mars, it needed to master an earthly wasteland so hostile that it barely registers rain—and where even the microbes have given up....
How does a planet 95 times the mass of Earth end up light enough to float on water?
1+ day, 9+ hour ago (406+ words) The gas giant's vast bulk conceals a secret: spread that enormous mass across enough space, and it becomes lighter than water....
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
3+ day, 5+ hour 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?
3+ day, 11+ hour 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
1+ week, 1+ day 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, 3+ day 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, 3+ day 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, 4+ 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, 5+ 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...