Science

A child who can see 250 stars today may see fewer than 100 from the same place at eighteen: 51,351 naked-eye observations found the night sky brightening far faster than satellites had measured

A child who can see 250 stars today may see fewer than 100 from the same place at eighteen: 51,351 naked-eye observations found the night sky brightening far faster than satellites had measured

A child who can count 250 stars from home tonight may be able to see fewer than 100 from the same place at age eighteen if the recent measured rate of night-sky brightening continues. The stars would still be there. The difference would be the artificial light scattered through Earth’s atmosphere between them and the … Read more

Mercury is the Solar System’s smallest planet, but its metallic core fills about 85 per cent of its radius, leaving a rocky shell so thin that cooling has crumpled the surface into cliffs hundreds of kilometres long

Mercury is the Solar System’s smallest planet, but its metallic core fills about 85 per cent of its radius, leaving a rocky shell so thin that cooling has crumpled the surface into cliffs hundreds of kilometres long

Mercury is the smallest planet in the Solar System, but most of the distance from its centre to its surface passes through metal. NASA puts the radius of Mercury’s metallic core at about 2,074 kilometres, compared with a planetary radius of 2,440 kilometres. That is roughly 85 per cent of the planet’s radius. The percentage … Read more

Titan is never the same distance from Earth twice: the gap can run from about 1.2 billion kilometres to nearly 1.65 billion depending on where both worlds sit in their orbits, stretching a signal’s one-way trip from just over an hour to past ninety minutes

Titan is never the same distance from Earth twice: the gap can run from about 1.2 billion kilometres to nearly 1.65 billion depending on where both worlds sit in their orbits, stretching a signal's one-way trip from just over an hour to past ninety minutes

Titan is never quite the same distance away twice. Depending on where Earth and Saturn happen to be in their orbits when you ask, the gap between us and Saturn’s largest moon runs from around 1.2 billion kilometres at its closest to about 1.65 billion at its farthest, a swing of roughly 450 million kilometres, … Read more

Voyager 1 is down to two working science instruments, and the fix that just bought its twin, Voyager 2, another year of power is now being tested on a probe NASA says no longer behaves quite like its sibling

Voyager 1 is down to two working science instruments, and the fix that just bought its twin, Voyager 2, another year of power is now being tested on a probe NASA says no longer behaves quite like its sibling

Voyager 1’s power test came back at the end of July, and by Kareem Badaruddin’s own account it went about as well as an engineer could hope. Badaruddin is the Voyager project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and what he’s describing is the early stage of an attempt to do for Voyager 1 what … Read more

Perseid meteor shower set to dazzle northern hemisphere this week | Meteors

Perseid meteor shower set to dazzle northern hemisphere this week | Meteors

The Perseid summer light show is back, and viewing conditions are especially promising across the northern hemisphere.The meteor shower’s is expected to peak on Wednesday night into Thursday morning, and coincides with a total solar eclipse across Spain, Iceland and Greenland and a six-planet parade – though the best time to view the fireballs will … Read more

We Wouldn’t Be Here Without Poop

We Wouldn't Be Here Without Poop

Julien Kimmig’s career began with a surprising abundance of feces. As a PhD student working at a Cambrian site in northern Canada, Kimmig realized that roughly half the fossils in that outcrop were coprolites, or fossilized poops. Kimmig, now the head of the paleontology and evolution division at the Natural History Museum in Karlsruhe, Germany, … Read more