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 ...
Space doesn’t just loom above us – it has stamped its fingerprints into our rocks, oceans, climate, and even the length of our day. Scientists now read those marks like a case file, tracing cataclysms and quiet nudges that steered Earth’s story long before we arrived. What emerges is part thriller, part user’s manual for ...
On a wind-bitten summit in northern Chile, a new eye has opened and the sky has started to move. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory – freshly outfitted with the world’s largest astronomical camera – has shifted from a dream to a working machine, capturing its first on-sky images in 2024 and pushing into an intense ...
On warm August nights, the heavens put on a show far grander than any firework display. The Perseid meteor shower, famous for its fast, bright streaks, is about to peak. But in 2025, stargazers face a challenge: a bright waning gibbous Moon rising just as the shower reaches its height. The cosmic puzzle is simple—how ...
For centuries, the heavens have been a pattern of twinkling lights, far-off galaxies, and the occasional comet flying overhead across the blackness. But between the stars is something much more mysterious vast, invisible clumps of gas, floating unseen across the universe. Now astronomers have revealed one of these hidden giants, a huge crescent-shaped molecular hydrogen ...
