The scientists behind NASA’s largest and most powerful space telescope ever built are bracing for potentially crippling budget cuts, and the observatory is only halfway through its primary mission. The team overseeing NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has been directed to prepare for up to 20% in budget cuts that would touch on every … Read more
Whenever someone brings up Lana and Lilly Wachowski’s body of work, The Matrix is always at the center of the conversation. Maybe Speed Racer and Cloud Atlas get some mentions thanks to their vocal followers, but their spacefaring epic Jupiter Ascending is typically swept under the rug. A critical and financial disaster, most people wouldn’t … Read more
Clyde Tombaugh didn’t set out to discover Pluto when he sent his sketches of the night sky to Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona in 1929. More than anything, he just wanted to get off the farm in Kansas where he spent his days working the earth. At just 23 years old, Tombaugh sent his drawings, … Read more
View larger. | In this image from Voyager 1 – acquired on February 14, 1990, from a distance slightly past the orbit of Saturn – planet Earth appears as a pale blue dot within the sunbeam, just right of center. As you can see, the blue glow of Earth occupies less than a single pixel … Read more
Canadian artist Gustav Hahn painted his impression of what the 1913 Great Meteor Procession looked like. Image via Gustav Hahn/ Wikimedia Commons (public domain). February 9, 1913: the Great Meteor Procession An odd and still-unexplained parade of meteors on this date dazzled viewers in Canada, the northeastern United States and ships in the Atlantic all … Read more
As we eagerly await Doom: The Dark Ages, which will hopefully arrive in 2025, many diehard fans are replaying the entire Doom. Twenty years later, Doom 3 continues to be an inflection point for the franchise, and gamers still can’t agree on whether it was great or a disappointment. What if it was a bit … Read more
The U.S. Space Force celebrates its fifth anniversary today. The service was formally established on Dec. 20, 2019, when President Donald Trump signed it into law with the National Defense Authorization Act, the bill that allocates U.S. military spending each year. Since then, the U.S. Space Force has grown to nearly 15,000 servicemembers and civilian … Read more
Every year, you can ring in the new year by going out at midnight and finding the dazzling star Sirius, sometimes called the New Year’s Star. In 2025, Sirius will be joined by the bright planets Jupiter and Mars. And of course, the bright constellation Orion the Hunter makes them easy to find. You can’t … Read more
High-energy, powerful, and violent stellar explosions called “superflares” have been found to erupt from stars like the sun roughly once every 100 years, making these blasts far more common than scientists had thought. Solar flares, eruptions of high-energy radiation, can have serious effects on Earth, with the potential to impact communication systems and power infrastructure. … Read more
The Hubble Space Telescope has spent more than thirty years providing some of the most incredible images of the known universe, but it’s only for the last ten that scientists have pointed its gaze at our solar system’s outer planets to observe them like never before. For the past decade, NASA’s Outer Planet Atmospheres Legacy … Read more