That planet is too big.
Ars Technica reports on a bafflingly huge exoplanet spotted by the Webb Space Telescope. It’s the size of Neptune, but closely orbiting a star much […]
astronomy
Science Art: Exoplanets Poster, Institute of Physics, 2023
This is a… well, it’s pretty self-explanatory, really. Unlike most of the images collected here, it’s got its own description printed right on it. These […]
Science Art: Planetary Systems, with Five Opening Flaps, from Geographical Studies by Levi Walter Yaggy, 1887.
I found this fascinating artifact in a wonderful article in Public Domain Review about Yaggy’s maps, pop-ups, and 3D diagrams of the Earth’s surface, habitats, […]
SONG: Clockwork of the Sky
SONG: “Clockwork of the Sky”. (available as .wav here) ARTIST: grant. SOURCE: Based on BBC, 8 Sep 2023, “Asteroid behaving unexpectedly after Nasa’s deliberate Dart […]
There’s a watery planet way out yonder.
Science Daily shares the latest James Webb Space Telescope discovery, of a large planet around a distant star whose chemical traces show a high likelihood […]
Space mission seems to have changed asteroid’s orbit.
BBC is reporting on the DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) mission, which touched down on the asteroid Dimorphos (which orbits larger asteroid Didymos) earlier this […]
Science Art: Comparison of planets and stars (2017 update), by Dave Jarvis and Jcpag2012.
This is another way of doing a Cosmic Zoom, comparing the sizes of astronomical things. If you’ve wondered how many Earths could fit inside Arcturus, […]
Science Art: If Bodies fill the Same Angle, their Size is Proportional to their Distance, 1898
This is an oddly domestic example of an astronomical principle … or maybe it only seems domestic to me because I keep a bicycle in […]
Astronomers might finally have seen the universe’s first stars.
Scientific American reports on a James Webb Space Telescope discovery, allowing scientists the first possible glimpses of the very first stars ever to shine in […]
Science Art: NASA’s Chandra, Webb Combine for Arresting Views (Pillars of Creation), 2023
This is an image made by combining visible light (from the Hubble and ESO orbiting telescopes) and invisible infrared and X-ray imagery (from the Webb, […]
We can get back to the night sky. But it will take work.
Ars Technica reports on the ongoing blotting out of the stars at night, with artificial light pollution doubling in the last 10 years alone. There […]
Webb snaps Milky Way-like galaxies taking shape long, long ago.
PhysOrg looks back (via the James Webb Space Telescope) to when the universe was a quarter of its current age, and has been able to […]
Science Art: MAGIC telescopes detected the highest-energy gamma rays from a Gamma Ray Burst…, 2019.
This is an illustration of MAGIC telescopes capturing images of very intense gamma rays. “MAGIC” refers to the twin Major Atmospheric Gamma Imaging Cherenkov (MAGIC) […]
“BOAT” gamma burst shines a light brighter than any seen in 50 years.
Science News says the BOAT (for “brightest of all time”) has shed new light on a galaxy very, very far away … and even affected […]
Comets from the Milky Way’s other arms helped form Earth’s continents.
Science News winds back the astronomical clock to the early days of Planet Earth, when waves of comet collisions seem to have slammed the planet’s […]