On 4 November 2011, six men emerged from a windowless capsule based on the site of the Institute of Biomedical Problems in Moscow, Russia. They had been inside their spaceship for 520 days, enough time to (optimistically) go to Mars and back...
Remember when I said back in October that Voyager 1 might have finally left the solar system? Well, it turns out that the spacecraft, which has been skirting the edge of the solar system for a long time now, is finding it difficult to say goodbye.According to scientists working on the mission, Voyager 1 has just entered a "magnetic highway"...
A new method for investigating dark energy has allowed astronomers to peer further back into the past than ever before, revealing a universe that was very different to the one we live in today...
Today is Ada Lovelace day, which is all about celebrating the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering and maths. I want to use it as an excuse to highlight the work of Henrietta Leavitt.Leavitt was a pioneering woman astronomer at a time when women were mainly employed in observatories to be nothing more than 'human computers'...
It was on my first birthday that the Voyager 1 spacecraft turned around and took a picture of the pale blue dot we call home. That picture was Voyager's last glimpse of Earth before its camera was switched off and it began to sail, uninterrupted, towards interstellar space...
Most people are familiar with the pale blue dot image of Earth taken by Voyager in 1990. Its blueness is significant, of course, because it is Earth's abundant liquid water that makes it look that way.But if you looked at the light that is reflected from Earth carefully, you would see several interesting features...
A supernova that lit up the skies in the year 1006 lived and died fast, leaving no companion star behind, astronomers have found. The result is the latest clue in a puzzle that has been troubling astronomers for some time – how does this type of stellar explosion happen?Supernova 1006 exploded, as seen from Earth, in the year 1006 (hence the name)...
On its 35th birthday, the Voyager 1 spacecraft is a little closer to home than we had hoped it would be at this point.The Voyagers, 1 and 2, are right at this moment speeding away from us towards interstellar space...
Here's an eruption from the sun that happened just a few days ago. It is a coronal mass ejection that loops out from the sun, looking slightly like a lightbulb that has just switched on...
In five billion years the sun is going to blow up into a red giant, then collapse back down again into a white dwarf - a dying star roughly the same size as Earth itself.
If you think this star system looks a little crowded, that's because it contains all of the possible alien worlds found by the Kepler planet-hunting mission so far.
When Brian Schmidt got his PhD in astrophysics in 1993, he was one of less than a handful of people that year that graduated with a thesis on supernovae.
The Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field Camera 3 took this picture of a cluster of ancient stars in the Milky Way, known as Messier 107. It is a globular cluster that is eighty light years across and about 20,000 light years from the solar system.Globular clusters contain hundreds of thousands of stars held together in a sphere by gravity...
Cancel your plans for the next three minutes and forty nine seconds and watch this video instead. I never normally post time lapse videos on their own, but this video of views from the International Space Station at night, made by Knate Myers, has just become my new favourite...
Heather Gray, a researcher working on the ATLAS experiment at CERN, was at this year's Lindau meeting. I spoke to her over email before it started to find out about her expectations, and afterwards she told me about her impressions of the meeting and what it was like to watch the announcement from CERN with other young researchers...
If you don’t know English, you can still understand Shakespeare’s stories, Sir Harold Kroto told me after his lecture at Lindau on Thursday. But, crucially, “you cannot understand his use of language, because language is a cultural thing – and the culture is lost in translation.” ‘Lost in translation’ was the title of Kroto’s lecture that morning, the final plenary session of the Lindau Nobel Laureates Meeting...
It's the Scientific American blog network's first birthday today! Taking a leaf out of Ed Yong's book, or rather blog, to celebrate our birthday, we've decided to give the floor over to you, dear readers...
By their very nature, those discoveries that most change the way we think about nature cannot be anticipated This was Douglas Osheroff’s claim at the start of his lecture on Wednesday morning, where he promised to tell the young researchers at Lindau “how advances in science are made”.In his talk Osheroff offered five things that scientists should keep in mind if they want make a discovery...
"From a dream with atoms and spins and electrons dancing around, to a device that we use in our daily life” is how Albert Fert described the link between fundamental physics and its applications...
Heather Gray, originally from South Africa and currently working at CERN, is one of the attendees producing a video diary to document her time at the Lindau meeting this year.
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