Intellect Plus
Space
396 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 4 of 7.
- Rocky worlds much bigger than Earth may be surprisingly rarePlanet hunters once spoke of super-Earths as if giant rocky worlds were everywhere. Then modelling of how mass relates to size suggested that beyond about 1.6 Earth radii, planets…
- The most distant thing some people can see without a telescopeOn a truly dark night, a few sharp-eyed observers can make out a faint smudge in the constellation Triangulum. It is a spiral galaxy almost 2.9 million light-years away, about hal…
- Neptune's largest moon orbits backwards and was probably stolen from the Kuiper beltTriton circles Neptune the wrong way, against the planet's spin, which no other large moon in the Solar System does. Moons on backward orbits cannot form alongside their planets, …
- Why the star alphabet runs O, B, A, F, G, K, MAstronomy students memorise the star types with a cheeky line: Oh, Be A Fine Girl, Kiss Me. The jumbled letters run from the hottest stars to the coolest, but nobody who first ass…
- The smallest stars will outlive the current age of the universe many times overA massive, hot O-type star leaves its prime after only a few million years. A tiny red dwarf of a tenth the Sun's mass may keep fusing hydrogen for six to twelve trillion years. S…
- Measuring how stars move revealed hidden black holes and dark matterStars do not drift at random. Their speeds and paths are set by all the mass around them, seen and unseen. By clocking stellar motions, astronomers have detected giant black holes…
- Stars run internal dynamos that flip their magnetic poles on a scheduleEvery 11 years the Sun's main magnetic field turns upside down, so a full cycle takes about 22 years. The flip is the work of a dynamo inside the star, where churning, electricall…
- A star like the Sun is built inside out compared with a heavier oneIn the Sun, energy crawls outward from the core as radiation and then boils to the surface in convection currents. In stars more than one and a half times heavier, the arrangement…
- The Sun is the roundest natural object ever measuredSatellites measuring the Sun's shape found it bulges at the equator by just eight parts per million, less than expected. That makes it the closest thing to a perfect sphere nature…
- Not every huge, brilliant star counts as a true supergiantSome stars shine thousands of times brighter than the Sun yet are not supergiants at all. Astronomers define the label two ways, by the look of a star's spectrum and by the stage …
- Stars are born inside freezing clouds that can outweigh the Sun millions of timesThe birthplaces of stars sit at about ten degrees above absolute zero. Giant clouds of molecular hydrogen, some a hundred light-years across and holding up to six million solar ma…
- Some stars that look like partners only line up by chance from EarthTwo stars side by side in the night sky may have nothing to do with each other. Astronomers separate true star systems, bound by gravity and circling one another, from optical dou…
- The smallest known black hole is only about twenty kilometres wideIn 2020 astronomers reported a black hole of just 3.3 solar masses, only 19.5 kilometres across, hiding in a binary called 2MASS J05215658+4359220. Stellar black holes, the collap…
- Wolf-Rayet stars reach surface temperatures near 210,000 kelvinMost stars show dark absorption lines in their spectra. In 1867, Charles Wolf and Georges Rayet found three stars in Cygnus whose spectra glowed with bright, broad emission bands …
- The zodiac was born as the first celestial coordinate systemAround 401 BC, under Persian rule, Babylonian astronomers carved the Sun's yearly path into 12 equal slices of 30 degrees each, modelled on idealised 30-day months. Long before ho…
- Uranus spins on its side, so each pole gets 42 years of daylightUranus is tipped over by 82 degrees, so it rolls around the Sun rather than spinning upright. Over its 84-year orbit, each pole spends about 42 years in unbroken sunlight followed…
- The Big Dipper is only the tail end of a much bigger bearThe seven stars called the Big Dipper in North America and the Plough in Britain form just the hindquarters and tail of Ursa Major, the Great Bear. The whole constellation spreads…
- The Little Bear was once called the 'dog's tail'Ursa Minor, home of the North Star, carried an odd ancient nickname: Cynosura, Greek for dog's tail. Nobody knows why, since no neighbouring constellation was ever a dog. One trad…
- A star that blinked every 11 months helped overturn AristotleIn 1638 Johannes Holwarda noticed that Omicron Ceti brightened and faded on an 11-month cycle. David Fabricius had taken it for a nova in 1596. Together with the supernovae of 157…
- Vega was the first star after the Sun ever photographedOn 17 July 1850, William Bond and John Adams Whipple at Harvard College Observatory pointed a daguerreotype camera at Vega and captured the first photograph of any star besides th…
- The Virgo Cluster is still assembling itself from merging galaxy clumpsSome 53.8 million light-years away, roughly 1,300 galaxies, perhaps as many as 2,000, crowd together in the Virgo Cluster. It is not a settled city but a young one: three main clu…
- The Milky Way lives on the edge of a flattened galaxy superclusterOur Local Group sits near the outskirts of the Virgo Supercluster, strung along a thin filament of galaxies running from the Fornax Cluster toward the Virgo Cluster at its centre.…
- Cosmic voids look empty but still hold some matterBetween the great filaments of galaxies lie voids up to 300 million light-years across that seem almost bare. They are not truly empty: even their sparsest parts contain more than…
- The Whirlpool Galaxy owes its perfect spiral to a smaller neighbourM51, the Whirlpool Galaxy, was the first object ever seen to have spiral arms, and its graceful shape is probably the work of a smaller companion. NGC 5195 appears to have punched…
- Einstein's 'greatest blunder' may decide how the universe endsBelieving the cosmos was static, Einstein added a cosmological constant to his equations to hold gravity in check. When Hubble showed the universe was expanding, Einstein called i…
- Everything you can see makes up under 5 percent of the universeStars, planets, gas and people are all built from ordinary matter, which accounts for only about 4.84 percent of the universe's mass and energy. Invisible dark matter makes up rou…
- About sixty percent of all spacecraft sent to Mars never finished the jobThe first spacecraft to land softly on Mars, the Soviet Mars 3 in December 1971, went silent after 14.5 seconds. Britain's Beagle 2 vanished in 2003 and was spotted twelve years l…
- Hubble survived a botched mirror and a NASA official who deliberately defunded itThe Hubble Space Telescope launched in 1990 with a main mirror ground to the wrong shape, blurring its vision until astronauts fixed it in 1993. Years earlier, a NASA manager had …
- People have lived aboard the ISS without a break since November 2000Since the first long-stay crew arrived on 2 November 2000, there has not been a single moment without humans aboard the International Space Station. It is roughly the size of a fo…
- Reaching orbit means going sideways at nearly 8 kilometres every secondGetting to space is mostly about speed, not height. An orbital rocket must climb to roughly 150 kilometres, then push its cargo sideways at no less than 7,814 metres per second so…
- Gerard Kuiper opened Mauna Kea to astronomy, then lost it to a rival bidIn the 1960s planetary scientist Gerard Kuiper persuaded Hawaii's governor to bulldoze a dirt road up Mauna Kea and put the mountain's first telescope on a cinder cone. When NASA …
- Mir was bolted together in orbit over ten years, one module at a timeMir, Russian for peace or world, was the first space station assembled piece by piece in orbit. Between 1986 and 1996 seven pressurised modules were added, each swung into place b…
- NASA grew out of a 1915 committee worried America had fallen behind in flyingAlthough the Wright brothers' Dayton is hailed as aviation's birthplace, by 1914 the United States knew Europe had overtaken it in the air. Congress responded in 1915 with a resea…
- While Armstrong and Aldrin walked the Moon, a Soviet probe crashed nearbyThree days before Apollo 11 launched, the Soviet Union sent an uncrewed probe, Luna 15, to scoop up lunar soil and beat the Americans home with it. It reached orbit first. On July…
- Apollo started as a spacecraft project, not a plan to land on the MoonWhen NASA manager Abe Silverstein picked the name Apollo one evening in early 1960, picturing the god driving his chariot across the Sun, nobody had committed to a lunar landing. …
- NASA's own deputy chief wanted American space travellers called cosmonautsIn 1959, before anyone had flown to space, NASA's deputy administrator Hugh Dryden argued for cosmonaut: crews would travel through the cosmos, not to the stars, which is what ast…
- ALMA's drivers carry oxygen to move 115-tonne telescopes around a Chilean plateauHigh in Chile's Atacama Desert, two giant 28-wheeled trucks lift radio dishes weighing 115 tonnes and set them down on concrete pads with precision. The air at 5,000 metres is so …
- China's space agency is barely thirty years old and already landed on the Moon's far sideFounded only in 1993, the China National Space Administration became the first agency ever to touch down on the lunar far side, with Chang'e 4. It has since returned Moon samples …
- Europe's space agency holds the record for the most distant landingIn 2005 a European probe called Huygens parachuted onto Titan, Saturn's largest moon, the farthest from Earth any spacecraft has ever touched down. Nine years later another Europe…
- Robots explore delicate worlds partly because people cannot be sterilisedA robotic probe can be scrubbed clean before launch so it does not seed another world with Earth microbes. A human cannot, since each of us carries countless microorganisms that n…
- The launch countdown was invented for a 1929 German science fiction filmFritz Lang's Woman in the Moon, released in 1929, showed a multistage rocket rolled slowly to an upright launch pad while a clock ticked down to liftoff. Neither the pad nor the c…
- A rocket nozzle works perfectly at exactly one altitude and nowhere elseThe bell at the bottom of a rocket engine is not decoration. Roughly half the thrust comes from exhaust pressing against its inner walls. But the ideal bell shape depends on outsi…
- The Soviet space programme ran for decades without any central space agencySputnik, Gagarin and Mir all came from a system with no single agency in charge. Power sat with rival design bureaus and a council of chief designers. So when Boris Yeltsin create…
- The first artificial satellite to reach orbit was a moon made of bricks, in fictionEighty-eight years before Sputnik, the American writer Edward Everett Hale published The Brick Moon, a story about launching a man-made moon into orbit. Isaac Newton had already s…
- An idea NASA first called dangerous and impractical shaped the Saturn V's Moon missionsIn the early 1960s, NASA planned to fly one enormous rocket straight to the lunar surface and back. Meeting up in orbit was dismissed as risky and unworkable. A Langley engineer, …
- Earth, every moon and every asteroid together barely register on the Solar System's scalesPut the whole Solar System on a balance and the Sun alone accounts for 99.86 percent. Of the scraps left over, the four giant planets take 99 percent. Everything else, including E…
- The man behind Sputnik had once been sent to a labour camp in KolymaSergei Korolev, who would steer the Soviet Union to the first satellite and the first human in orbit, was arrested in June 1938 during Stalin's purges and shipped to a Kolyma forc…
- A day stranded without a toilet changed how Soyuz crews come homeUntil the late 1980s, Soyuz crews cast off their orbital module, which held the toilet and the docking collar, before firing the engine to come home. Then in September 1988 the So…
- The brightest star's hidden partner was deduced 18 years before anyone saw itIn 1844 Friedrich Bessel noticed that Sirius wobbled as it drifted across the sky, as if tugged by something invisible. He concluded it had an unseen companion. On 31 January 1862…
- A faint smudge in the southern sky handed astronomers their first cosmic yardstickHenrietta Swan Leavitt spent years comparing photographic plates of the Small Magellanic Cloud. Because every star in that dwarf galaxy sits at roughly the same distance, she coul…
- Ancient eclipse records quietly measure how fast Earth's spin is slowingAstronomers can say with confidence that a total eclipse will happen on a given date centuries from now, but not exactly which longitudes the shadow will cross. The reason is that…
- Radio galaxies blow lobes of plasma far beyond their visible starsSeen in ordinary light, a radio galaxy looks like a large elliptical galaxy. Tuned to radio wavelengths, it sprouts two vast lobes stretching well past its stars, inflated over te…
- When a star's core runs dry, its outer layers balloon outwardOnce a Sun-like star uses up the hydrogen in its core, the core shrinks while the layers above swell to tens or hundreds of times the Sun's width. Astronomers call this the mirror…
- Stretched starlight revealed that the universe has a historyLight from the Big Bang started out at about 3,000 kelvin. Stretched by the expansion of space over billions of years, it now arrives as a faint 3-kelvin microwave glow. That stre…
- Rigel is labelled beta yet usually outshines Orion's alpha starJohann Bayer's 1603 lettering normally gives beta to a constellation's second-brightest star, yet Orion's beta, Rigel, nearly always beats Betelgeuse. One astronomer suspects Baye…
- A comet hunter stumbled on the Ring Nebula and filed it awayCharles Messier was searching for comets in January 1779 when he came across a faint smudge in Lyra. It became the 57th entry in his list of objects not to confuse with comets. Wh…
- Earth may once have worn a ring like Saturn'sAbout 466 million years ago, craters from a burst of meteor strikes seem to have clustered in a band around Earth's equator. A 2024 study reads that pattern as the fallout of a ri…
- Why the Milky Way's central black hole earned an asteriskWhen Robert Brown named the compact radio source at the heart of our galaxy in 1982, he tacked on an asterisk because he found it exciting, borrowing the physicists' symbol for an…
- Nobody knows exactly how long a day lasts on SaturnSaturn has no solid surface to track, and its clouds spin at different speeds depending on latitude. Voyager's radio readings suggested a day of about 10 hours 39 minutes, but whe…
- Ordinary-looking spiral galaxies can hide a blazing black hole corePhotograph a Seyfert galaxy in visible light and it resembles any other spiral. Examine other wavelengths and its tiny core turns out to shine about as brightly as all the stars o…