Just as sound can echo off distant objects, light can echo too. And the echoes of light bouncing off stellar remnants, black hole accretion disks, and clouds of gas and dust provide astronomers with another method of probing the distant cosmos.
We’ve now discovered thousands of exoplanets, we’re learning more and more about the kinds of planetary systems there are out there across the Universe. But are planets like Earth unique or totally rare?
All the waiting is over, we’ve finally seen the image of the event horizon from the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way. Different shaped blobs! And a black circle in the middle. What are we looking at?
We’ve always assumed that we lived in a perfectly normal star system with a normal star and normal planets. It’s all… normal. But with our modern understanding of billions of stars, just how normal is our Sun, anyway?
The Earth is teeming with life, but the upper atmosphere to kilometers underground. There’s no question that our planet has life. But is our planet itself alive?
There are general-purpose telescopes and missions that astronomers can use to study specific objects. And there are the survey missions that look at the entire sky, which astronomers can use to answer questions about the Universe.
It’s Spring in the Northern Hemisphere, and that means the Sun is back. But it’s more than just a free heat lamp for your garden, it’s an incredible, dynamic nuclear reaction complete with flares, coronal mass ejections, twisting magnetic fields and the solar wind
Knowledge moves forward, and so, we must move with it. Today we’ll give you an update on some of the most fascinating, fast-changing topics in astronomy, astrophysics and cosmology.
Although humans have never actually been to Mars, explorers have simulated many aspects of Mars missions here on Earth. There are missions under the ocean, on the tops of volcanoes, in the harsh Canadian north, and even in bed that simulate the limitations of spaceflight, and teach us many of the lessons to prepare us for the real thing.
Computers are a big part of astronomy, but mostly they’ve been relegated to doing calculations. But recent developments in machine learning have changed everything, giving computers the ability to do jobs that humans could only do in the past.