Every night sky looks calm, but it’s anything but. The universe is stretching, gently and relentlessly, turning yesterday’s constellations into a wider, thinner tapestry. Scientists have chased this mystery across a century, building clever tools to measure a cosmos that refuses to sit still. The surprise isn’t just that space expands; it’s that the more ...
They slip through the dark like unregistered ships, drifting far from the glow of any sun. Astronomers call them rogue planets – worlds without a home star – and a provocative question has burst back into the spotlight: could there be more of these wanderers than stars in our galaxy. The mystery is sharpened by ...
Step onto the Moon and the scale plays a delightful trick: your weight plummets, your steps feel springy, and suddenly the body you know behaves like it’s learning a new dance. Behind that thrill is a story of mass, distance, and the quiet pull of worlds – nothing mystical, just the universe’s rules applied in ...
Light takes time to travel, and that simple truth turns the James Webb Space Telescope into a time machine. When Webb opens its golden eye, it doesn’t just catch distant starlight – it intercepts messages that left their sources when Earth was still cosmic dust. In newsroom terms, every image is a breaking story filed ...
Binary stars can be chaotic places for planets, and for years that chaos pushed many searches toward calmer, single suns. Now a team has flipped the script. By singling out 591 “edge-on” twin-star systems identified with Gaia data, researchers argue that these complicated neighborhoods may actually be the easiest places to find new worlds. Their ...
We treat oxygen like the star of biology, but for most of Earth’s history it was barely a cameo. Long before forests greened the continents, microbes thrived by shuttling electrons into minerals, acids, and salts that would sound more at home in a chemistry set than a lung. Today, as we scan other worlds, a ...
It’s one of the most audacious questions of our time: not just whether we can go, but whether we can stay. The difference between a flag-planting visit and a permanent foothold is the difference between a camping trip and building a town. Scientists are now testing hardware, biology, and human limits in a coordinated push ...
On the longest human timescales we can imagine, our night sky is not fixed at all – it is already in motion toward a cosmic crash. Astronomers have known for more than a century that the Milky Way and the neighboring Andromeda galaxy are edging closer together, but in the past decade that vague ...
Walk outside on a clear night, look up, and remind yourself of this unsettling fact: almost everything you can see is the cosmic equivalent of a rounding error. Stars, planets, glowing gas, galaxies, you and me – all of it together makes up only a tiny sliver of the universe’s true contents. The rest ...
It sounds simple: measure the gap between our blue world and the star that keeps it alive. Yet the answer hides inside moving targets, rippling heat, and a clock that never ticks at a constant pace. Scientists pin the average distance near one astronomical unit, a tidy figure that anchors spaceflight, climate science, and our ...
