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Back to list of articles It's harder than ever to escape light pollution, but doing so has never been more rewarding. Credit: Molly Wakeling Have you ever seen the Milky Way? Only 20 percent of the U.S. population lives in a place where they can. Away from light pollution, the wide, ghostly band almost looks
The Gegenschein rests on the tip of the fainter, pyramid-shaped false zodiacal light. Credit: Stephen James O'Meara In April 1961, Galaxy The magazine contained an article titled “The Enigma Called Gegenschein” by German-American science writer Willy Ley. Referring to the mystery of who was the first to identify the faint glow of the Gegenschein, Ley
Back to list of articles The theoretical limit may be what is called the Planck temperature, derived using fundamental universal constants. Workers walk past a section of magnets at CERN's Large Hadron Collider, where researchers are probing plasmas like those that filled the early universe. Credit: Samuel Joseph Hertzog/CERN We all accept that the coldest
Neutron stars are incredibly dense objects about 16 km across. Only their immense gravity keeps the matter they contain from exploding; if you brought a spoonful of a neutron star to Earth, the lack of gravity would cause it to expand rapidly. Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/UNAM/Ioffe/D. Page, P. Shternin et al; optical: NASA/STScI; illustration: NASA/CXC/M. Weiss
Back to list of articles Light from UHZ1 has traveled 13.2 billion light-years – a longer travel time than any other known black hole. This composite image shows the galaxy cluster Abell 2744 as seen by JWST and the Chandra X-ray Observatory. Superimposed on the infrared image of the galaxies is a purple “haze” created
E: The Time Telescope was an almanac published in London between 1814 and 1834. Credit: Raymond Shubinski Every September, almanacs begin appearing all over the United States. The most well-known is The Old Farmer's Almanac, which has been in print since 1792. Its cover claims it is “useful, with a pleasant degree of humor,” and
Back to list of articles The duration of the pulsations of these stars is always related to their intrinsic brightness. Astronomers can use this knowledge to calculate the distance. RS Puppis is a Cepheid variable star whose brightness varies by a factor of five approximately every 40 days. Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage
The Moon rises over the mountains of Utah. Credit: NASA/Bill Dunford. Why does the Moon sometimes appear so large when it rises on the horizon? Ryan FrazBuffalo, North Dakota Ryan refers to the so-called Moon IllusionSometimes, when the Moon is just peeking over the horizon, it appears truly enormous. Some people see it, others don't,
Back to list of articles Artist's impression of a black hole destroying Earth. Credit: ESO/M.Kornmesse What are the chances of dark matter or a black hole tearing the Earth apart? Antonio RicoLexington, Kentucky Our planet is safe from being torn apart by a black hole or dark matter. The gravity between objects in our solar
Return to article list Find the few galaxies floating in a cosmic ocean of nothingness. Four “bright” members of the Boötes Void are around magnitude 15. Each field measures 5' on a side. Credit: digital sky studio I don't normally write much about deep, “holy grail” objects, but in the case of the Boötes Void
