Roland Lehoucq, Commissariat à l’énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives (CEA) and François Graner, Université Paris Cité
By 2025 Elon Musk wants to launch 12,000 satellites and corner the global Internet market. What will be lost is earth-based astronomy, the idea that space belongs to us all and the beauty of a starry sky.
Woodcut from Camille Flammarion’s 1888 book L'Atmosphère : météorologie populaire. The caption reads: ‘A missionary of the Middle Ages tells that he had found the point where the sky and the Earth touch’ and continues, ‘What is there, then, in this blue sky, which certainly exists, and which veils the stars during the day?’
Wikipedia
Albert Einstein may have been the ultimate example of a visionary genius, but that did not stop him from twice losing his way due to beliefs that were perhaps not so scientific.
The sun emitting a sudden flash of light—a solar flare.
NASA
Sunanda Creagh, The Conversation and Antonio Tarquinio, The Conversation
The Dish in Parkes is scanning the southern Milky Way, searching for alien signals
The Conversation50.7 MB(download)
Today we hear about the Parkes radio telescope's role in the search for alien life. Our guide is the irrepressible John Sarkissian, the scientist who's had his eye on The Dish since childhood.
Betelguese is the red star in the top right quarter of the picture.
NASA scientists have discovered a new planet orbiting around a nearby star that is in a habitable zone. But does this planet have liquid oceans that can support life?
Dark sky sites can inspire new generations of stargazers, but a better long-term solution would be connecting people with the night sky where they live.
Stars come into existence because of a powerful force of nature called gravity.
ESA/Hubble & NASA, Acknowledgement: Judy Schmidt
Around the world and throughout history, we find remarkably similar constellations defined by disparate cultures, as well as strikingly similar narratives describing the relationships between them.
Dr. Burbidge is presented with the “Woman of the Year” award in 1976, while professor at UC San Diego.
Annie Gracy/Wikipedia
In an age when women were rarely allowed in observatories, Margaret Burbidge changed how we saw the stars.
Another reason you don’t want to get too close to a black hole is because of something we call ‘spaghettification’. If this happened to Earth it would be… unpleasant.
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If you got too close to a black hole, it would suck you in and you’d never be able to escape, even if you were travelling at the speed of light.
This point of no return is called the event horizon.
When it was young, the Sun spun fast – very fast. It would do one rotation in a just one or two Earth days.
www.pixabay.com
Yes, the Sun absolutely spins. In fact, everything in the universe spins. Some things spin faster than the Sun, some are slower and some things spin ‘backwards’.
‘Unknown Pleasures’ as you’ve never seen it before…
Freeda/Shutterstock
Jonti Horner, University of Southern Queensland and Stephen Kane, University of California, Riverside
Science is full of surprises. While searching for planets orbiting nearby stars, researchers stumbled across the remains of a star that once outshone the Sun.
What’s left after a star explodes.
NASA/ESA/JHU/R.Sankrit & W.Blair via Wikimedia Commons.
Shooting stars are not stars at all. They are tiny space adventurers who accidentally wander into our sky and get sucked toward us by Earth’s gravity. Here’s the story of a shooting star’s journey.
The warped spiral galaxy ESO 510-G13 seen edge-on.
NASA