Tag Archives: space

Theres a famous star that I'm sure you've seen in the sky. Its name is Betelgeuse, and you can find it in the Orion constellation, where it marks Orion's right shoulder. If you want to call it “Beetlejuice,” I'm fine with that so long as you don't say it three …

Almost exactly two years ago, as it prepared for the next generation of human spaceflight, NASA chose a pair of private companies to design and develop new spacesuits. These were to be new spacesuits that would allow astronauts to both perform spacewalks outside the International Space Station as well as …

Everybody poops, including astronauts. In fact, the first picture Neil Armstrong ever snapped from the surface of the moon shows a jettisoned waste bag that may well contain poop. The Apollo crews left a total of 96 bags of waste, including urine and feces, across their six landing sites, which …

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. About 13.8 billion years ago, the entire cosmos consisted of a tiny, hot, dense ball of energy that suddenly exploded. That’s how everything began, according to the standard scientific story of the Big Bang, a theory that first took shape …

In an update released late Friday evening, NASA said it was “adjusting” the date of the Boeing Starliner spacecraft’s return to Earth from June 26 to an unspecified time in July. The announcement followed two days of long meetings to review the readiness of the spacecraft, developed by Boeing, to …

SpaceX has completed a mostly successful fourth test of its revolutionary new Starship rocket, a key step toward returning humans to the Moon and, maybe one day, landing on Mars. The flight, integrated flight test 4, lifted off today from SpaceX’s Boca Chica test site in Texas at 7:50 am …

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. The end is brutal for electrons hurtling at 99.9999999 percent of the speed of light through SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory’s two-mile-long beam pipe: a final slam into End Station A. In the late 1960s and early ’70s, such collisions broke …

Auroras filled much of the world’s skies for several nights in mid-May as a historic geomagnetic storm coursed 100 kilometers above our heads. Being able to see auroras so deep into the tropics was possibly a once-in-a-lifetime experience, but there will almost certainly be more strong geomagnetic storms later this …

The aurora borealis is usually visible only way up north, but two weeks ago the night sky was filled with shimmering curtains of pink and green light that could be seen all the way down into the southern US. People in Texas and Hawaii got out of their cars to …

A team of physicists has discovered that it’s possible to build a real, actual, physical warp drive and not break any known rules of physics. One caveat: The vessel doing the warping can’t exceed the speed of light, so you’re not going to get anywhere interesting anytime soon. But this …