Space and astrophysics research made simple
On 4 November 2011, six men emerged from a windowless capsule based on the site of the Institute of Biomedical Problems in Moscow, Russia. They had been inside their spaceship for 520 days, enough time to (optimistically) go to Mars and back...
Remember when I said back in October that Voyager 1 might have finally left the solar system? Well, it turns out that the spacecraft, which has been skirting the edge of the solar system for a long time now, is finding it difficult to say goodbye.According to scientists working on the mission, Voyager 1 has just entered a "magnetic highway"...
A new method for investigating dark energy has allowed astronomers to peer further back into the past than ever before, revealing a universe that was very different to the one we live in today...
Today is Ada Lovelace day, which is all about celebrating the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering and maths. I want to use it as an excuse to highlight the work of Henrietta Leavitt.Leavitt was a pioneering woman astronomer at a time when women were mainly employed in observatories to be nothing more than 'human computers'...
It was on my first birthday that the Voyager 1 spacecraft turned around and took a picture of the pale blue dot we call home. That picture was Voyager's last glimpse of Earth before its camera was switched off and it began to sail, uninterrupted, towards interstellar space...
Most people are familiar with the pale blue dot image of Earth taken by Voyager in 1990. Its blueness is significant, of course, because it is Earth's abundant liquid water that makes it look that way.But if you looked at the light that is reflected from Earth carefully, you would see several interesting features...
A supernova that lit up the skies in the year 1006 lived and died fast, leaving no companion star behind, astronomers have found. The result is the latest clue in a puzzle that has been troubling astronomers for some time – how does this type of stellar explosion happen?Supernova 1006 exploded, as seen from Earth, in the year 1006 (hence the name)...
On its 35th birthday, the Voyager 1 spacecraft is a little closer to home than we had hoped it would be at this point.The Voyagers, 1 and 2, are right at this moment speeding away from us towards interstellar space...
Here's an eruption from the sun that happened just a few days ago. It is a coronal mass ejection that loops out from the sun, looking slightly like a lightbulb that has just switched on...
In five billion years the sun is going to blow up into a red giant, then collapse back down again into a white dwarf - a dying star roughly the same size as Earth itself.
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