Marina Koren

Are you in the mood to feel small? Like cosmically small? And not because of the usual dreamy, slightly cheesy stuff that space can offer—the idea that we exist on a tiny speck of rock clinging to our beautiful sun in the darkness. I’m talking about some truly wild action, so intense that it warps space-time, the invisible scaffolding that holds up everything we know, and reverberates for hundreds of millions of light-years.Then astronomers have got something for you.

For astronomers, a tiny blip in data can signal the existence of an entire world. It happens when a planet far beyond our solar system passes in front of its own star. The planet blocks a tiny bit of light, making the shining star appear fainter to us. Scientists have used these moments to discover thousands of exoplanets in the Milky Way—icy planets and lava planets, hot Jupiters and miniature Neptunes, planets with a thick atmosphere and planets with no atmosphere at all.

The story sounds ridiculous, but it’s true: A man in Ohio recently drove his car into a utility pole after a cicada flew through his open window and smacked into his face. He was fine! The car, not so much.The Brood X cicadas have certainly made their presence known over the past several weeks: their ceaseless screeching from the treetops, their slow, meandering manner of flying around, sometimes right into us.

On rainy days, Kaitlyn Loftus likes to imagine herself somewhere else. Not on a sun-soaked beach, but on another world in the middle of its own rainstorm. Beneath the swirling storms of Jupiter or Saturn’s hazy cloud tops, where helium drops from the sky. On Neptune, where it might drizzle diamonds. Maybe Titan, a moon of Saturn, where methane rain can fill entire lakes.Loftus is a planetary scientist at Harvard, and for her, otherworldly rain is more than a daydream.

Jeff Bezos founded his spaceflight company two decades ago, at the turn of the millennium. You may not have known that, because Blue Origin spent years developing its rocket technology in secret. But by now you’ve probably heard, because Bezos wants everyone to know: Blue Origin is sending passengers to space, and he’s going on the inaugural trip himself.

In June of 1769, an astronomer named David Rittenhouse prepared to observe a rare cosmic phenomenon, the transit of Venus. Rittenhouse had built an observatory on his farm in Pennsylvania to monitor the planet as it moved across the face of the sun, a small black dot against the glowing orb in the afternoon sky.

The mysterious flying objects showed up in Washington, D.C., on a hot, humid night in the summer of 1952. The air-traffic controllers at the airport saw them first, and then so did the operators at nearby Air Force bases—seven unexplained blips on their radar screens. A commercial pilot in the vicinity reported seeing bright lights in the darkness. The Air Force dispatched fighter jets but found nothing. A week later, it happened again. More blips. More jets.

In a strip mall just off Houston’s NASA Parkway is a restaurant called Frenchie’s Italian Cuisine. You wouldn’t know it from the unassuming beige storefront, but inside, Frenchie’s looks like a museum. The walls are covered in framed pictures of smiling astronauts, in their blue jumpsuits and puffy spacesuits, holding up bubble helmets and model spaceships.

In a strip mall just off Houston’s NASA Parkway is a restaurant called Frenchie’s Italian Cuisine. You wouldn’t know it from the unassuming beige storefront, but inside, Frenchie’s looks like a museum. The walls are covered in framed pictures of smiling astronauts, in their blue jumpsuits and puffy spacesuits, holding up bubble helmets and model spaceships.

There are many unknowns in the field of space exploration.

There are many unknowns in the field of space exploration.

The full moon looked stunning this week. The lunar phase coincided with the moon’s closest approach to Earth, making the object look bigger and brighter than usual. It glowed orangey-pink low in the sky—a trick of the atmosphere—and then blanched brilliant white as it rose into the darkness.Meanwhile, down here, a couple of space billionaires are sparring over how to reach it.

NASA / JPL-Caltech / Jason Major
For the first time in history, humankind has taken flight on another planet. Millions of miles from Earth, on an alien world with a wisp-thin atmosphere, a tiny helicopter rose into the air, hovered for 39 seconds, and then gently touched back down on the surface of Mars.Today’s historic flight is a tremendous feat of engineering and a marvelous display of—as the aircraft is named—ingenuity.

In 2019, Gennady Borisov, an amateur astronomer in Crimea, discovered his seventh comet. This icy object wasn’t like the others Borisov had found, or like any of the other comets in the solar system. This one wasn’t orbiting the sun.Instead, it had been drifting alone in interstellar space, following its own path, until one day, it entered our solar system and grazed past the sun.

Joshua Rhoades was standing near an abandoned farmhouse in rural Illinois on a windy night in early March, fiddling with his camera, when he noticed what he called “a faint, eerie, ethereal glow” above him. A pillar of light had illuminated the darkness, stretching from the horizon—a hint of sun, but it was nearly 8 p.m.

Since the Apollo era, when every astronaut was white, and a man, NASA has worked to expand its vision of who participates in space exploration. Women used to sew spacesuits; now they wear them. Women, especially Black women, once weren’t credited for their contributions; now they serve in the agency’s upper echelons. President Joe Biden could have chosen the first woman to lead NASA in its 62-year history. Many people in the space community expected him to do exactly that.He did not.

There’s a spot in space, thousands of light-years from here, that might best be described as a cosmic amusement park. A supergiant star, so hot that it glows electric blue, and a black hole spin around each other at extraordinary speeds, orbiting so closely that some of the star’s material is pulled toward the black hole. The stellar particles swirl around the invisible object in a tilt-a-whirl of luminous reds and oranges.

The descent of a little rover from the top of the Martian atmosphere to the surface is one of the most notoriously stressful occasions in space exploration. When NASA’s newest rover, Perseverance, took the plunge last week, the engineers at mission control braced themselves. They knew just how much had to go right—and how much could go terribly wrong—in the next seven minutes.The spacecraft came barreling into the atmosphere at thousands of miles an hour.

Troy Hudson didn’t want to think about Mars. It was Christmas, he had taken some time off, and this planet had enough going on at the end of 2020. But Mars was difficult to escape, he told me. It twirled in a mobile of the solar system in his home. It sat right there on his skin, tattooed on his arm, below the elbow. Hudson had spent more than a decade working on a robot that was currently parked on the surface of Mars, and NASA was about to decide whether to give up on it.

Last month, as 2020 drew to a close and we on Earth completed one of our strangest orbits around the sun, news broke that astronomers had picked up a mysterious signal from another star.Astronomers could tell, from the specific properties of the beam of radio waves, that it wasn’t made by an act of nature, such as a cosmic explosion. The signal coming from the star’s direction was produced by technology.

At last, the days are getting longer in the Northern Hemisphere, a change that feels particularly welcome now, given, well, everything. But winter is just getting started. In any other year, we’d be firmly in a season of cozy indoor gatherings. This year, however, requires that we avoid anything of the sort, especially as America’s coronavirus epidemic continues to worsen and a new and worrying mutation of the virus has emerged.

The AtlanticTonight, if it’s not cloudy, look for two points of light huddled together in the night sky—one as bright as a star, the other slightly dimmer. Step outside an hour after sunset, stick a hand out, and cover them with your thumb. There, in the space of a fingertip, you’ll hold Jupiter, Saturn, and the many moons around them both.Jupiter and Saturn come together like this in Earth’s night sky only once every 20 years, when the orbits of all three planets align.

A few days ago, at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union, one of the most important conferences in science, a certain session began with a sharp reminder, akin to a school teacher’s instructions to play nice. “Remember, this is a scientific session, and we will have different viewpoints,” said Sushil Atreya, a climate and space sciences professor at the University of Michigan and one of the conference’s organizers.

The missions that humankind has sent farthest into space, a pair of NASA spacecraft called the Voyagers, are billions of miles from Earth. The last time one of them took a picture of its surroundings was in 1990, after flying by Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, and Uranus on its way to interstellar space, the mysterious expanse between stars. This far beyond the planets, there’s not much to see.But there are some things to feel, in the sense that a spacefaring machine can feel something.

In December of 1995, astronomers around the world were vying for a chance to use the hottest new tool in astronomy: the Hubble space telescope. Bob Williams didn’t have to worry about all that. As the director of the institution that managed Hubble, Williams could use the telescope to observe whatever he wanted. And he decided to point it at nothing in particular.Williams’s colleagues told him, as politely as they could, that this was an awful idea.

One of the most powerful telescopes in the world is on the brink of collapse.Arecibo, a giant radio observatory nestled in the lush mountains of Puerto Rico, did some of the dreamiest work in astronomy. But it was forced to stop operations this year after suffering unprecedented damage, and officials now believe that it is beyond repair. Instead of trying to fix it, they’re going to tear it down.The trouble began in August.

SpaceX’s first attempt to fly astronauts to space and back was, from start to finish, a success. The launch into orbit—seamless. The spacecraft’s arrival at the International Space Station—smoothly done. On return, the capsule, buffeted by billowy parachutes, coasted through the sky, toward the waters off the coast of Florida—a vision of a new era of American spaceflight.

NASA / JPL / University of Arizona / The AtlanticUpdated at 6:53 p.m. on November 10, 2020.One of Jupiter’s moons might be glowing in the dark.At first glance, this is perhaps unsurprising. Our own moon glows in the dark, reflecting the light of the sun. Jupiter is far away from here, but our star still illuminates the planet and its many moons, including the moon Europa.But Europa is different from the others.

The Milky Way is home to hundreds of billions of stars, and many more planets. Some come in sets, as in our own solar system. But not every planet orbits a star.Some planets actually wander the galaxy alone, untethered. They have no days or nights, and they exist in perpetual darkness. In a kitschy NASA collection of travel posters for destinations beyond Earth, one of these cold worlds is advertised with the motto: “Visit the planet with no star, where the nightlife never ends.

Santiago Vidal / GettyLast week, NASA announced that scientists were preparing to reveal “an exciting new discovery” about the moon—something significant for future astronaut missions to the lunar surface. The space agency was otherwise light on details, and speculation swelled. Had NASA found aliens? Is the moon haunted? Is it actually made of cake? “What a tease!!” Chris Evans, Captain America himself, cried.