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.