The Milky Way’s forecast: mostly cloudy. But the origin of these cosmic clouds is unclear Beyond the bright swirling arms of our Milky Way galaxy, something enormous, mysterious and shadowy barrels toward us. It’s called Smith’s Cloud. And it isn’t like any cloud you’ve seen before. From head to tail, it extends more than 11,000 light-years. […]
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From totality to tremendous light shows, our sun put on a shining performance. The sun had a big year in 2024. First, April brought a total solar eclipse that provided a wide swath of the continental U.S. with nearly four minutes of hushed totality. It also gave sun-gazers a chance to observe the outer layers
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Last May, scientists reported that they’d successfully grown plants in moon soil for the first time. At the University of Florida’s Space Plants Lab in Gainesville, a dozen Arabidopsis thaliana plants germinated and grew, each in a few teaspoons of lunar regolith — the dusty material that covers much of the moon. “The first surprise was that
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If you want to study the stars, there’s no better place to start than close to home. After all, the nearest star is just 93 million miles (150 million kilometers) away: the Sun. Its daily presence and predictable motions through the sky may make it seem like a boring, steady companion. But up close, it’s an
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Space oddities may help reveal dark matter and other secrets in the Milky Way. Astronomer Warren Brown explains. In April, the European Space Agency released the second massive trove of data from Gaia, a spinning, scanning satellite that for nearly five years has been spying on a billion stars. Its goal is to produce a
Unbound and Out: Boosted by black holes, stars speed off, leaving clues behind Read More »
NASA is studying what personality an astronaut candidate needs to make the journey to Mars. Can we go to Mars without going crazy? In May 2001, Discover’s cover story asked exactly that, exploring unanswered questions about the psychological perils of humans crammed together and flung through space. At the time, scientists didn’t have much data to
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Frank Borman was probably the first person to barf in space. Borman was part of NASA’s Apollo 8 mission, which lifted off a launch pad in Florida on December 21, 1968. Over the next six days, the mission made history as it circled the moon and returned home. But Borman, who led the mission, became
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Something about going to Mars has captivated the space-curious for generations; from scientists who want to build the spaceships and go, to politicians who can approve the spending. “Mankind is drawn to the heavens for the same reason we were once drawn into unknown lands and across the open sea,” said US President George W
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For the last five years, NASA’s Juno spacecraft has been barrelling towards its final destination: Jupiter, king of the planets. On 4 July this year, the four tonne, spinning craft – which looks like an oversized propeller that has abandoned its plane – will fire its thrusters and slow down enough to be captured by
The presence of water isn’t the only Mars mystery scientists are keen to probe. Another centers around a seemingly trivial characteristic of the Red Planet: its size. Classic models of solar system formation predict that the girth of rocky worlds should grow with their distance from the sun. Venus and Earth, for example, should exceed
