StarDate

If you ignore the dark orange sky and the extreme cold, Saturn’s moon Titan might remind you of Earth. River channels empty into lakes and seas. Giant fields of dunes ripple across the surface. And clouds float through the sky, producing occasional rains.And if everything goes to plan, we should get some amazing views of that landscape in the next decade. A nuclear-powered “octocopter” will fly...

The night sky is disappearing. Growing cities and towns pump more artificial light into the sky all the time. That creates a glowing dome that blots out the view of the Milky Way, meteors, and other beautiful but faint sights.Light pollution does more than make it impossible to appreciate the beauty of the night sky. It can interfere with the migrations of many animals, and it can harm human...

William Lassell made a fortune selling beer to factory workers in Liverpool. He used that money to set up his own astronomical observatory, called Starfield, outside Liverpool. And he equipped it with telescopes he built himself – some of the best in the world.Using one of those instruments, Lassell made a major discovery 175 years ago this week. Make that two discoveries: two large moons of the...

The modern constellations offer a convenient way to appreciate the beauty of the night sky. Using the outline of a scorpion or a lion as a landmark makes it easier to find your way around. It’s also a good way to exercise your imagination.Our imaginations don’t all show us the same pictures, though. The western constellations were passed down from ancient Greece and Rome. And many of them are...

Some high-speed bullets are firing across the night sky this week. They’re the bits of debris that produce the Orionid meteor shower – small pebbles left behind by Comet Halley. They hit the atmosphere at about 150,000 miles per hour. They vaporize almost instantly, forming the glowing streaks known as meteors.Halley visits the inner solar system once every 76 years or so. On each approach, the...

Meteorology is the study of Earth’s atmosphere and its weather and climate. Despite the name, it has nothing to do with meteors – at least not directly. But more broadly, meteors and meteorology are related – in their names. Both words come from a Greek word that meant “the heavens above” or “things high up.”Meteorology was first used by the Greek philosopher Aristotle, around 340 B.C. A “meteor”...

The oldest objects on Earth didn’t come from our home planet. They were born in space more than four-and-a-half billion years ago. They fell to Earth as the most common type of meteorite.Chondrites account for about 85 percent of all meteorites. They’re named for tiny round beads of material known as chondrules. The beads formed in the disk of gas and dust that encircled the newborn Sun. Grains...

The solar system is big. Really big. It’s almost three billion miles from the Sun to Neptune, the most distant major planet. It’s more than three billion miles to Pluto. And it’s more than twice that far to the edge of the Sun’s magnetic “bubble” – the boundary with interstellar space.It’s almost impossible to comprehend those distances – they’re just too far beyond anything we ever experience....

A meteorite found in the Sahara Desert could be a fragment of a destroyed sibling of Earth. The small planet might have been blasted to rubble when the solar system was young. Some of the planet’s remains could have been incorporated into the other rocky worlds, including Earth.NWA 12774 is a one-pound meteorite that was found in northwestern Africa in 2019. It belongs to a rare class known as...

Antares, the bright star at the heart of Scorpius, huddles quite close to the Moon early this evening. They set not long after the sky gets dark, so there’s not a lot of time to look for them.The Moon is a thin crescent now, so it’s night across most of the lunar disk. But on the bright sliver that’s in daylight, you can still make out some of the dark lunar “seas” – vast plains of volcanic rock....