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.
Many millions of miles from Earth, an asteroid and a spacecraft are traveling together. The asteroid, as wide as a skyscraper is tall, is ancient, almost as old as the solar system itself. The spacecraft, dispatched more recently, circles the asteroid like a tiny mechanical moon. Tonight, if everything goes as planned, the spacecraft will swoop toward the asteroid, touch its surface, and snatch some rocks before backing away again.
Buzz Aldrin remembers feeling “buoyant” and “full of goose pimples” when he stepped onto the moon in 1969, becoming the second person to touch the surface of another world. The view was magnificent.The first thing he did was examine the ground beneath his boots. “I immediately looked down at my feet and became intrigued with the peculiar properties of the lunar dust,” the Apollo astronaut recalled in one of his memoirs.
The first picture ever captured of a black hole, one situated in the center of another galaxy, was pretty blurry. Seen in silhouette, it appeared fuzzy, as did the ring of hot gas surrounding it. The reaction of the public did not necessarily match the unalloyed joy of astronomers accustomed to extracting cosmic wonders from lines in a graph. To anyone more familiar with black holes from epic space films, this one mostly looked like a flame-glazed donut.
Elsewhere in the solar system, a NASA rover is on its way to Mars. It carries, among other things, several pieces of spacesuit material. Designers want to see how the samples fare in the planet’s dusty, radiation-laden environment—the sturdy fabrics of the suit’s exterior, the cut-resistant fibers of its gloves, the shatterproof plastic of the bubble helmet that might someday reflect the soft light of a Martian sunset.
Updated at 7:22 p.m. ET on Sept. 14, 2020.After the moon, Venus is the brightest object in the night sky, gleaming like a tiny diamond in the darkness. The planet is so radiant because of its proximity to Earth, but also because it reflects most of the light that falls across its atmosphere, more than any other world in the solar system.Something really weird is happening in those clouds.
Arecibo Observatory / University of Central FloridaIf the name Arecibo sounds familiar, it is probably because you’ve seen Contact, the 1997 movie adaptation of Carl Sagan’s sci-fi novel of the same name. Dr. Ellie Arroway works at the Arecibo Observatory, scanning the skies for mysterious radio signals from faraway stars. In one scene, she gazes at the cavernous 1,000-foot radio dish, nestled in lush mountains, under a clear, blue sky.
Paul Byrne loves Mars. He wrote his doctoral thesis and several research papers about the planet. Most of his graduate students study Mars. And yet, earlier this year, he posed this question on Twitter: “If you could end the pandemic by destroying one of the planets, which one would you choose and why would it be Mars?”What does Byrne, a planetary scientist at North Carolina State University, have against the red planet? Nothing, he told me.
In recent years, as SpaceX launched rocket after rocket without incident, liftoff became the company’s second-most-impressive feat. The truly dazzling moment came after the rocket had left the ground, and its booster—or, sometimes, two boosters—reversed course high up in the air, flipped around, and glided back down, landing upright on the ground or a barge floating in the Atlantic Ocean, ready to be refurbished and used again.
ESO / Bohn et alAstronomers have a saying about how difficult it is to see a distant planet outside of our own solar system: It’s like spotting a firefly next to a lighthouse.Stars are so luminous that they block our view of planets that might be orbiting nearby, so astronomers have to work around them. They use special instruments on telescopes to block the light coming from these celestial beacons. With the glare gone, they can detect something else: heat radiating off of planets.
Even during the worst of the pandemic in New York City, when the threat of the virus had emptied out the streets, the lights of Times Square stayed on, its many towering advertisements flashing and flickering.
A star has gone missing.Not in our own Milky Way, but in a galaxy about 75 million light-years away. The star in question is so hot that it glows crystal blue, and it shines a couple million times brighter than the star we know best, our sun. Even as stars go, it’s massive. Astronomers have studied it for nearly two decades, so it was pretty disconcerting when, one day last year, they looked at the latest observations and realized they couldn’t find it anymore.
Astronomers don’t usually jump out of bed when they receive alerts in the middle of the night that, somewhere far away, two black holes have smacked into each other and sent shock waves coursing through the universe. These days, the detection of colliding black holes verges on routine, and astronomers know what to do: Go back to sleep.