-
The Milky Way’s Stars Reveal Its Turbulent Past
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Late in the evening of October 5, 1923, Edwin Hubble sat at the eyepiece of the Hooker telescope at the Mount Wilson Observatory atop the mountains overlooking the Los Angeles basin. He was observing an object in the northern sky. To the unaided eye, it…
-
Northern Taurid meteor shower could soon produce extra-bright meteors
(CNN) — The Taurid meteor shower is not quite finished, with one of its two streams set to peak this weekend. When the Northern Taurids, an annual minor shower, is at its most active, sky-gazers could catch sight of a bright meteor or two streaking across the night sky. The Southern Taurids peaked November 5,…
-
The Bodily Indignities of the Space Life
As an incubator of life, Earth has a lot going for it, something we often fail to appreciate fully from within its nurturing bounds. Merely sending probes and rovers to the moon and Mars won’t do. For various reasons — adventure! apocalypse! commerce! — we insist upon taking our corporeal selves off-world too. Multiple private…
-
This Week In Space podcast: Episode 87 — One Lunar Fizz Please
On Episode 87 of This Week In Space, Tariq and Rod discuss drinking in space with Colleen McLeod Garner. As more people take tourist jaunts into space, and eventually into orbit for longer stays, social drinking will become part of the experience—even if it’s just that bottle of congratulatory champagne. Besides the odd effects of…
-
Space photo of the week: James Webb telescope finds a secret at the Crab Nebula’s heart
What it is: The highest-resolution image of the Crab Nebula (M1) ever taken Where it is: 6,500 light-years away, in the constellation Taurus When it was taken: October 2023 Why it’s so special: This new infrared image from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) shows one of the night sky’s most studied and most impressive…
-
Access to this page has been denied
Yale astronomer Priyamvada Natarajan helped do something extraordinary — reach back to the dawn of time to discover the glimmers of an ancient quasar. Using a pair of space borne telescopes, Natarajan and her research team found UHZ1, just 450 million years after the Big Bang and far outside our own galaxy. Moving farther away…
-
Astronauts dropped a tool bag during an ISS spacewalk, and you can see it with binoculars
Some astronomy targets are less celestial in nature than others. Joining stars, planets, nebulas, and galaxies as a target for skywatchers is now a surprisingly bright tool bag floating through the space around Earth. The bag of tools gave NASA astronauts Jasmin Moghbeli and Loral O’Hara the slip on Nov. 2, 2023, as they were…
-
What did ancient humans know about astronomy?
Imagine going back thousands of years and showing off the cool astronomical functions of your smartphone. It can tell the date and time with incredible accuracy. It can pinpoint your location. It can even pull up a map of the stars, tell you the phases of the moon, and predict the next major astronomical event.…
-
I review star projectors for a living and this early Black Friday deal is one of the best I’ve seen all year.
No astronomy enthusiast’s home is complete without one of the best star projectors to light up those dark, cold evenings (that have well and truly arrived!) We have reviewed many models of star projectors and selected the best to feature in our Best Star Projector guide. The Pococo model is one of our favorites, and…
-
JWST and Hubble telescopes unite to image clash of galaxies
This panchromatic view of galaxy cluster MACS0416 was created by combining infrared observations from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope with visible-light data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Jose M. Diego (IFCA), Jordan C. J. D’Silva (UWA), Anton M. Koekemoer (STScI), Jake Summers (ASU), Rogier Windhorst (ASU), Haojing Yan (University of…