Look up at the night sky and it is filled with stars. But only a microscopic fraction are visible to the naked eye. In fact, there are estimated to be 100 billion stars in 10,000 billion galaxies in the visible universe. ...
Astronomy
Dec 18, 2015
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175
Black holes are the most extreme objects in the universe. Supermassive versions of these unimaginably dense objects likely reside at the centers of all large galaxies. Stellar-mass black holes—which weigh approximately ...
Astronomy
Nov 4, 2022
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930
Powerful flares, breathtaking views across the solar poles, and a curious solar "hedgehog" are among the haul of spectacular images, movies and data returned by Solar Orbiter from its first close approach to the sun. Although ...
Astronomy
May 19, 2022
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221
How far is the Sun? It seems as if one could hardly ask a more straightforward question. Yet this very inquiry bedeviled astronomers for more than two thousand years.
Space Exploration
Jan 5, 2015
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43
An enormous comet—approximately 80 miles across, more than twice the width of Rhode Island—is heading our way at 22,000 miles per hour from the edge of the solar system. Fortunately, it will never get closer than 1 billion ...
Astronomy
Apr 12, 2022
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1174
Researchers working at China's tokamak facility have announced that the team was able to hold 120-million-degree Celsius plasma for 1,056 seconds. In their announcement to the press, they noted that their achievement was ...
There are a few places in the universe that defy comprehension. And supernovae have got to be the most extreme places you can imagine. We're talking about a star with potentially dozens of times the size and mass of our own ...
Astronomy
Mar 15, 2016
0
54
An international collaboration of scientists has recorded the most accurate confirmation to date for one of the cornerstones of Einstein's theory of general relativity, 'the universality of free fall."
Astronomy
Jun 10, 2020
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14638
It has often been said that solar cells are like artificial versions of the photosynthetic apparatuses found in plants, such as leaves, since both harvest sunlight. But nature's leaves can do something that most solar cells ...
For thousands of years, astronomers have watched comets travel close to Earth and light up the night sky. In time, these observations led to a number of paradoxes. For instance, where were these comets all coming from? And ...
Space Exploration
Aug 11, 2015
1
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