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.
The American moon missions, more than 50 years later, are each memorable in their own way. Apollo 11, of course, is known for being the very first time human beings set foot on the moon. Apollo 12, for being a little rowdier. Apollo 13, for nearly ending in disaster. Apollo 14—the third of six moon landings—is known, as I recently discovered, for its “moon trees.”Stuart Roosa, one of the Apollo 14 astronauts, took a small canvas bag of tree seeds with him on the journey.
The world’s most powerful space telescope was ready to uncover the wonders of the universe, but first it needed some help from a little blue truck. The truck had to haul the James Webb Space Telescope, perched atop a more than 165-foot-tall rocket, to the launchpad at a spaceport in South America in late December. Next to the rocket, the vehicle looked almost decorative.
Kelly Korreck is still thinking about the time her spacecraft flew into the sun, how one moment, the probe was rushing through a stormy current of fast-moving particles, and the next, it was plunging somewhere quieter, where the plasma rolled like ocean waves. No machine had ever crossed that mysterious boundary before. But Korreck and her team had dispatched a mission for that exact purpose, and their plan worked.
To the world, the new telescope that recently launched to space is one of the most ambitious scientific endeavors in history. It is the next Hubble, designed to observe nearly everything from here to the most distant edges of the cosmos, to the very first galaxies.To Jane Rigby’s son, it’s “mama’s telescope.”Rigby, an astrophysicist, used to bring her young son to the NASA center in Maryland to watch the James Webb Space Telescope being assembled.
To the world, the new telescope that NASA recently launched to space is one of the most ambitious scientific endeavors in history. It is the next Hubble, designed to observe nearly everything from here to the most distant edges of the cosmos, to the very first galaxies.To Jane Rigby’s son, it’s “mama’s telescope.”Rigby, an astrophysicist, used to bring her young son to the NASA center in Maryland to watch the James Webb Space Telescope being assembled.
KOUROU, French Guiana—More than 25 years ago, the Next Generation Space Telescope was mostly a dream, an idea for a complex instrument meant to see farther than Hubble ever could, which no one had ever attempted to build. A few years ago, the dream was ready to be assembled into a real observatory—gold-covered mirrors, sensitive instruments, a sophisticated sun shield.
The biggest, most powerful space telescope in history is currently sitting on top of a rocket in French Guiana, on the northeastern coast of South America, awaiting its blazing departure from this planet. The James Webb Space Telescope is designed to point its 18 gold-coated mirrors into the darkness and reveal hidden wonders in the universe. But its last few months on Earth have been a little stressful.
The last thing anyone needs to think about right now is a catastrophic asteroid impact.And, thankfully, most of us don’t have to! Earth is not in immediate threat of a space rock. The chance that a known asteroid big enough to really do damage—or, you know, imperil our entire existence—will strike the planet in the next 100 years is insignificant.
Ed Rivera-Valentín has spent quite a bit of time thinking about brines recently. The particular ratio of salt to water in the marinade. The special ingredients that can give things an extra kick.I am referring, of course, to the salty solutions that are found across our solar system, on planets and moons and even asteroids. These would be no good on a Thanksgiving turkey, but they might be one of the most intriguing substances in the search for alien life.
The astronauts were still asleep when NASA called the International Space Station. “Hey, Mark, good morning. Sorry for the early call,” a mission controller said in the early hours of Monday morning, speaking with Mark Vande Hei, one of four NASA astronauts on board. But the astronauts needed to get up, mission control said calmly, and move to the spacecraft docked to the station. They needed to be prepared to potentially escape and head back to Earth. This was an emergency.
Update your calendars, everyone: NASA isn’t going to put people on the moon in 2024. The space agency announced yesterday that it is now aiming to send a crew to orbit the moon, Apollo 8 style, in May 2024, and then land astronauts on the surface, à la Apollo 11, sometime in 2025. If your reaction to this news is something like, Wait a second, what? NASA is trying to land people on the moon again?—that’s fine.
For most of us, today is just Thursday. For astronomers, it’s practically a holy day. Today is an event that comes only once a decade, and it’s of cosmic importance—literally. Today, a special committee has revealed the priorities for the next decade of American astronomy, like a synod giving word from on high.
Imagine Jupiter and its little asteroids as cosmic Halloween decor on the solar system’s front stoop. The planet itself—swirly, stormy, the largest in the solar system—is the pumpkin, while the tiny asteroids that accompany it are kind of like funky-shaped gourds, one cluster in front and the other behind. The pumpkin and these gourds have been on display like this for billions of years, strung together by a quirk of gravity, tracing the same loop around the sun.
Millions of miles away, on the surface of Mars, inside an enormous crater, a little NASA rover is taking some pictures. The view is quite stunning there—miles of undisturbed cinnamon terrain scattered with pebbles and boulders, with silky dunes where the craggy bedrock doesn’t peek through. But when the rover, named Perseverance, sent the photos back home from the crater, known as Jezero, scientists saw something more.
On the night he went to space, Jeff Bezos threw a party for his employees. The hotel restaurant in Van Horn, a town in West Texas not far from the launch site, was thrumming. Inside, someone had cut into the frosted Blue of Blue Origin on a big vanilla sheet cake. Outside, a live band jammed beneath a tent skimmed with café lights. Everyone was a little buzzed and a lot relieved. They had just launched their boss to space from the middle of the desert.
On the night he went to space, Jeff Bezos threw a party for his employees. The hotel restaurant in Van Horn, a town in West Texas not far from the launch site, was thrumming. Inside, someone had cut into the frosted Blue of Blue Origin on a big vanilla sheet cake. Outside, a live band jammed beneath a tent skimmed with café lights. Everyone was a little buzzed and a lot relieved. They had just launched their boss to space from the middle of the desert.