From its halo-like orbit nearly a million miles from Earth, the James Webb Space Telescope is seeing farther than human eyes have ever seen. In May, astronomers announced that Webb detected the most distant galaxy found so far, a fuzzy blob of red light that we see as it existed just 290 million years after […]
Pluto is probably best known for being a demoted planet. In 2006, the International Astronomical Union stripped it of its original classification, after narrowing the definition of a planet to be one that clears its orbit with its gravitational heft. Pluto doesn’t meet this membership criterion because its orbit is peppered with other icy bodies […]
Carlyn Kranking Assistant Editor, Science and Innovation Beginning to familiarize yourself with the night sky can feel daunting—with so many pinpricks of light above, parsing the constellations or identifying individual stars can be a lofty task. One starting point is to learn to find the brightest ones. In a rural sky dense with stars, the […]
Astronomers have created the most detailed infrared map of the Milky Way — and it contains more than 1.5 billion objects. Made using 13 years of observations across 420 nights, the new map charts a vast number of stars, “failed” brown dwarfs, free-floating planets and hypervelocity suns launched into space after close encounters with our […]
