Latest Articles - Page: 16
How to tell if a star is close?
Figuring out how far away a star truly is presents one of the greatest measurement challenges in astronomy, largely beca...
What is the peak luminosity of a supernova?
A stellar explosion marks one of the most dramatic events in the cosmos, a momentary blaze that can dwarf the collective...
Do rockets use fuel in space?
The simple answer to whether rockets still need fuel once they are already in the vast emptiness of space is an emphatic...
Why can't Boeing Starliner come back?
The Boeing Starliner capsule’s mission profile has been significantly altered, leaving its two astronaut passengers, But...
How bright can a supernova get?
The spectacle of a dying star culminates in an event of such colossal energy release that, for a brief period, its light...
What does the closest star look like?
The star closest to our Sun, the one that holds the title of our nearest stellar neighbor, is **Proxima Centauri** [^5][...
How does a star look closer?
The night sky presents an illusion of order, where countless distant suns appear as mere pinpricks of light scattered ac...
Could Mars rover talk?
The perception that NASA's robotic explorers on Mars are having conversations or expressing feelings in perfectly formed...
Can Spirit rover talk?
The idea that a machine exploring Mars can communicate with us in fluent, narrative sentences is captivating. When we he...
Who was the first person to find a nebula?
The night sky, to the naked eye, presents a collection of sharp, distinct points of light we call stars. Yet, even befor...
Who discovered the nebulae?
The very idea of a "discoverer" for nebulae is complex, as the term itself evolved over time, starting as a catch-all fo...
What is the oldest Messier object?
The question of which Messier object holds the title for being the "oldest" in the universe is fascinating because it fo...
How were nebulas discovered?
The first glimpses of what we now call nebulae were confusing smudges in the eyepiece of early telescopes. Before powerf...
What were the three major components of the solar nebula?
The vast, swirling cloud of gas and dust that birthed our Sun and its attendant planets—the solar nebula—was not a homog...
What is the biggest Messier object?
The search for the most significant or largest object within Charles Messier's famous catalog of deep-sky sights inevita...
What planets have we crashed satellites into?
The act of sending an artificial object toward another world often culminates in a planned or unplanned collision, a fin...
What does the solar nebula contain?
The solar nebula, that vast, rotating cloud of gas and dust from which our Sun and all the planets coalesced, was a dyna...
What is the rotation curve of a galaxy?
This fundamental concept in astrophysics, the galaxy rotation curve, is essentially a graph mapping out how fast materia...
How many planets have we landed rovers on?
The count for planetary surfaces visited by robotic wheeled vehicles designed to roam is surprisingly small. To date, hu...
Who manages the Hubble telescope?
The management of the Hubble Space Telescope is not the job of a single person or even a single organization; it is a co...
What planets have humans landed probes on?
The human endeavor to send robotic envoys beyond Earth has resulted in a surprisingly small number of confirmed *landing...
What are the three factors that make a planet habitable?
The quest to determine if a planet can support life rests on a set of environmental parameters, often extrapolated from ...
What type of galaxies have gas and dust in them?
The makeup of a galaxy—specifically, the presence or absence of the raw materials for new stars—is fundamentally tied to...
Why does the Sun seem so big to us even though it is an average star?
It’s a fundamental observation of human existence: the Sun dominates the sky. Every day, it rises as a brilliant, massiv...