Rebecca Boyle writes: Late in the evening of October 5, 1923, Edwin Hubble sat at the eyepiece of the Hooker telescope at the Mount Wilson Observatory, atop the mountains overlooking the Los Angeles basin. He was observing an object in the northern sky. To the unaided eye, it was visible as a faint smudge. But… Read More »
Dennis Overbye writes: What good are the laws of physics if we can’t solve the equations that describe them? That was the question that occurred to me on reading an article in The Guardian by Andrew Pontzen, a cosmologist at University College London who spends his days running computer simulations of black holes, stars, galaxies… Read More »
Dennis Overbye writes: On a field just below the summit of Crawford Hill, the highest point in Monmouth County, N.J., almost within sight of the skyscrapers of Manhattan, sits a cluster of shacks and sheds. Next to them is the Holmdel Horn Antenna, a radio telescope somewhat resembling the scoop of a giant steam shovel:… Read More »
Sarah Scoles writes: From Earth, the night sky looks fairly static. Sure, the stars rotate from evening to evening, and the planets move among them. But from a terrestrial perspective, the celestial sphere appears essentially unchanging. Perception, though, is not reality: our eyeballs don’t hint that beyond nearby planets, stars and galaxies, everything is moving… Read More »
Adam Frank and Marcelo Gleiser write: Not long after the James Webb Space Telescope began beaming back from outer space its stunning images of planets and nebulae last year, astronomers, though dazzled, had to admit that something was amiss. Eight months later, based in part on what the telescope has revealed, it’s beginning to look… Read More »
Charlie Wood writes: Years before she was even sure the James Webb Space Telescope would successfully launch, Christina Eilers started planning a conference for astronomers specializing in the early universe. She knew that if — preferably, when — JWST started making observations, she and her colleagues would have a lot to talk about. Like a… Read More »
Astronomy reports: After an expedition that spent about 10 days scouring the ocean floor off Papua New Guinea with a magnetic sled, Harvard University astrophysicist Avi Loeb says he has collected more than 700 metallic spherules that are now undergoing detailed examination in his lab at Harvard as well as at least two other independent… Read More »
Lina Zeldovich writes: Floating in the middle of our galaxy, near the center of the Milky Way, inside a cloud of gas that swirls at the temperature of 100 Kelvin or -279.67 Fahrenheit, a molecule essential to life on Earth has just been discovered. It sounds inconceivable that such a level of cosmic cold could… Read More »
Adam Mann writes: Katherine Whitaker was on a video call with colleagues last summer when NASA released the first pictures from the ultra-powerful James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Among the many awe-inspiring images was one of a sliver of sky surrounding the galaxy cluster SMACS 0723: It was brimming with some of the oldest and… Read More »
The New York Times reports: By now, perhaps, we should be getting used to unreal images of the cosmos made with the James Webb Space Telescope. But a year after NASA released the cosmic observatory’s first imagery, the space agency has dropped yet another breathtaking snapshot of our universe. Wednesday’s image was Rho Ophiuchi, the… Read More »
The New York Times reports: At 11:12 a.m. on Saturday, the Euclid spacecraft launched into space on its mission to chart the history of our universe as far back as 10 billion years ago. The space telescope, built by the European Space Agency, will use its instruments to record more than a third of the… Read More »
The New York Times reports: From ghostlike particles, astrophysicists have pieced together a new map of the galaxy we live in. For now, that map of the Milky Way is blurry and incomplete. But as more data is gathered, it will become clearer and will help illuminate galactic convulsions like the expanding remnants of exploded… Read More »
Scientific American reports: After nearly two decades of listening, astronomers are finally starting to “hear” the rumbles of gravitational waves they believe emanate from the behemoths of our universe: supermassive black holes. The result comes from a National Science Foundation–sponsored initiative known as the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav). Since 2004 NANOGrav… Read More »
Science Alert reports: Biologists usually define ‘life’ as an entity that reproduces, responds to its environment, metabolizes chemicals, consumes energy, and grows. Under this model, ‘life’ is a binary state; something is either alive or not. This definition works reasonably well on planet Earth, with viruses being one notable exception. But if life is elsewhere… Read More »
The Washington Post reports: Saturn’s moon Enceladus has enticed scientists for years with its plumes fizzing their way up from an ocean beneath a thick crust of ice. Now there’s a new element to the story, literally: That cold, dark ocean appears to contain a form of phosphorus, an essential ingredient for life as we… Read More »
Sean Raymond writes: When Carl Sagan famously called Earth the “pale blue dot,” he was judging a book by its cover. Even though three quarters of our planet’s surface is covered by oceans, our planet is actually very dry. Water makes up about one part in a thousand of Earth’s mass (most of it is… Read More »
