Did you know that Neptune has rings?It’s true. The planet we’re now told is the farthest from us has a set of narrow bands made of dust. Planetary scientists know this, as do hard-core astronomy fans, probably. But for those of us who have certain textbook images of the solar system in our mind, the knowledge that Neptune is a ringed planet might come as a surprise.
Saturn has quite the collection of moons, more than any other planet in the solar system. There’s Enceladus, blanketed in ice, with a briny ocean beneath its surface. There’s Iapetus, half of which is dusty and dark, and the other shiny and bright. There are Hyperion, a rocky oval that bears a striking resemblance to a sea sponge, and Pan, tiny and shaped just like a cheese ravioli.But one moon might be missing.
By now, the spaceship should have been on its way to the moon. By now, NASA had hoped, the gumdrop-shaped capsule—designed to carry astronauts someday—would be sending all kinds of data back home, showing engineers how its first journey to space was going.But the capsule is still here, sitting atop a giant rocket that has so far refused to leave Earth.
Astronauts haven’t visited the moon in 50 years, but the United States is intent on taking them back. Hundreds of reporters from around the world traveled to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida this week to cover the launch of the first mission of an ambitious effort known as Artemis, Apollo’s sister in Greek mythology. The launch was called off yesterday when one of the rocket’s main engines refused to cooperate.
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.—The south pole of the moon is a stunning place. Towering mountains are bathed in perpetual sunshine, and the lunar dust, fine as powder, gleams in unfiltered light. Plunging craters exist in permanent shadow and hide pockets of ice in their gray rock, the water frozen and undisturbed for as long as 3 billion years.It is here, somewhere along this silent terrain, that NASA wants to land a new crew of astronauts.
Ah, the sounds of late summer. Pass a pool, and hear the happy yelps of kids splashing around. Sit outside at night, and bask in the soothing buzz of cicadas hidden in the trees. Open the internet, and hear the terrifying howling of outer space.Thank NASA for that last one. The space agency recently shared a clip online of sound coming from a cluster of galaxies about 250 million light-years from Earth.
Now that the world’s most powerful space telescope is finally up and running, we’re in for a constant stream of stunning images of the universe. Just a ton of galaxies everywhere, more detailed than you’ve ever seen them, and too many stars to count—all of it sparkling with an intensity that humankind hasn’t captured before.Not every interesting image from the James Webb Space Telescope is going to be a pretty picture, though.
Astronomy can be, in some ways, a bit like the classic board game Clue. Scientists explore a sprawling but ultimately contained world, collecting pieces of information and testing out theories about a big mystery. You can’t cover every corner, but with the right combination of strategy and luck, you can gather enough clues to make a reasonable guess at the tidy answer—who, where, and how—enclosed in a little yellow envelope at the center of it all.
One question keeps bouncing around my mind as I look at this image from the new James Webb Space Telescope: How is this real? I have followed the story of Webb for years, chronicling the ups and downs and controversies the mission has experienced on its way to becoming a real, functioning telescope. I’ve talked with many dozens of scientists and engineers about how the observatory works and the kind of high-resolution images it is designed to produce.
There are so many galaxies in here.Those bright, spiky points are nearby stars, but every tiny oval, every gleaming blob is a distant galaxy, a swirling creation brimming with stars and dust and planets. Some of the galaxies in the foreground are part of a cluster called SMACS 0723, so massive that its gravity warps the light coming from other, more distant galaxies. The effect magnifies their brightness, bringing thousands of them out of the darkness.
About six months have elapsed since the most powerful space telescope in history bid farewell to Earth and took off into the darkness. In that time, the James Webb Space Telescope has deployed its gold-coated mirrors, turned on its instruments, and gotten the hang of operating 1 million miles from Earth.
About six months have elapsed since the most powerful space telescope in history bid farewell to Earth and took off into the darkness. In that time, the James Webb Space Telescope has deployed its gold-coated mirrors, turned on its instruments, and gotten the hang of operating 1 million miles from Earth.
Lee Feinberg was on vacation, and he deserved it. It was late May, and Feinberg, a manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, had spent “an incredibly tense several months” leading the effort to carefully deploy the mirrors on the world’s newest and most powerful space telescope, making sure that each of the gold-coated tiles—18 in all, arranged in a honeycomb shape—was properly aligned.
UFOs? After years of avoiding any serious discussion of such things, NASA is on it.The space agency announced yesterday that it will form a team dedicated to studying unidentified aerial phenomena “that cannot be identified as aircraft or known natural phenomena.” Starting this fall, the team will examine existing data on these objects and brainstorm new ways to collect future data.
You don’t really hear about Neptune, do you?Not as often as the other planets, certainly. Space robots regularly provide snapshots of the surface of Mars and the clouds of Jupiter. Mercury is a frequent scapegoat for astrology-minded folks having a bad day (even though Mercury being in retrograde is actually just an optical illusion in our night sky). For 13 whole years, the Cassini spacecraft orbited Saturn before plunging into the planet, ending its glorious streak of observations.
You’ve probably heard some version of the line, usually delivered with a sigh. Someone is having a crappy day. Or they’re in a weird mood. Or nothing seems to be going right, despite their best efforts. And they’ve laid the blame on Mercury, the smallest planet in our solar system, nearest to the sun. Everything is Mercury’s fault. The darn thing is in retrograde. And in fact, it’s happening right now.
We live in the inner rim of one of the Milky Way’s spiral arms, a shimmery curve against inky darkness. Travel for thousands of light-years in one direction, past countless stars, countless planets, and countless moons, and you’d reach the outer edge of the Milky Way, where the last bits of our galaxy give way to the sprawling stillness of the intergalactic medium.
There’s a lovely scene in Interstellar—one of the best space movies in history; don’t argue with me—when the NASA pilot tasked with saving the day hands a pair of headphones to his fellow space traveler, a physicist, who’s having a difficult time on their perilous journey through space. When the physicist puts the buds in, he and the audience hear the distinct sounds of Earth: crickets, rain, the low rumble of thunder.
Last night, after Twitter accepted his $44 billion bid to buy the company, Elon Musk traveled to South Texas, where SpaceX is building prototypes for a rocket system designed to take people to Mars someday. Earlier, he had shared some of his to-do list for the social-media company he could soon own outright: “enhancing the product with new features,” “defeating the spam bots,” and making the platform’s algorithms public and available for anyone to see.
The first known record of an exploding star comes from Chinese astronomers in the second century. A radiant object, bursting with color, appeared suddenly in the night sky and glowed for about eight months before fading away. In the 11th century, the glow of an exploding star hung around for two whole years, appearing brighter than the moon in the beginning.
Let’s get it out of the way now. Any comments that might come to mind when you hear the name of the seventh planet from the sun pronounced a certain way—keep them to yourself. No giggles. Absolutely no wisecracks, damn it. No jokes! This is an earnest story about Uranus.Because this is a big day for Uranus.
Elon Musk, when he wants to, can be quite philosophical—as in February, when he gave a long speech about his vision for the future from his growing SpaceX spaceport in South Texas. “It is very important—essential—that, over the long term, we become a multi-planet species, and ultimately even go beyond the solar system, and bring life with us,” Musk said, standing in front of a prototype of a giant, gleaming rocket meant to one day travel to the moon and Mars.
Updated at 8:40 p.m. ET on April 5, 2022.Long before the rockets and the electric cars, before the high-speed trains and the brain implants and the flamethrowers, Elon Musk was in the content business.In 1996, Zip2, the company he’d founded with his brother, started courting newspapers with a service that would allow them to build online directories of classified ads, real-estate listings, car deals, and entertainment events.
Our universe is full of other worlds, orbiting their own suns. For most of human history, this was just an assumption, not a fact; astronomers could only peer through telescopes at distant stars and daydream about the planets that might be hiding in their glow. But then, about 30 years ago—quite recently, when you consider how long humans have been gazing at the skies—the cold, hard data appeared.
In the spring of 2020, a group of astronomers told the world a dramatic story: They had discovered a black hole just 1,000 light-years away from Earth, closer to us than any they’d found before. They’d detected it in a constellation called Telescopium, nestled alongside two stars that, on a clear night in the Southern Hemisphere, are visible to the naked eye.
The moon is a wonderland of craters—thousands of them, carved by asteroids hitting the surface over billions of years. Space rocks are still at it, and every year the bombardment scoops out dozens of craters big enough for moon-orbiting spacecraft to notice. Today, because of human beings and their little space things, Earth’s celestial companion got one more dent.This morning, a piece of space junk smacked right into the far side of the moon.
On Saturday, Ukraine’s vice prime minister made a plea for help directly to Elon Musk. “While you try to colonize Mars—Russia try to occupy Ukraine! While your rockets successfully land from space—Russian rockets attack Ukrainian civil people!” Mykhailo Fedorov tweeted. “We ask you to provide Ukraine with Starlink stations.
At this moment, about a million miles from Earth, the world’s most powerful space telescope is making tiny adjustments to its mirrors, aligning the shiny tiles just so. Soon, the starlight will come into focus for the James Webb Space Telescope, and the observatory will begin to make sense of it. Thousands of astronomers are simply buzzing, eager to see the marvels that Webb might pick out of the darkness.
The thought of a three-letter government agency preventing Elon Musk, currently the richest person in the world, from doing anything he wants might seem like a bureaucrat’s fantasy. This is the guy who got approval to launch a Tesla into space, who got a street renamed Rocket Road, who disregarded coronavirus restrictions when he felt they got in the way of business.
Picture Venus. You know, the second planet from the sun, where the clouds are shot through with sulfuric acid and the surface is hot enough to melt lead.What color is it?For the longest time, I thought of Venus as caramel-colored, swirled with golds, yellows, and browns—warm colors that matched the planet’s reputation for being a scorching world covered in volcanoes. And then I saw a picture of Venus that James O’Donoghue, a planetary astronomer, shared online recently.