Astronomy

98 articles with this tag

How RTGs Power Spacecraft Billions of Miles From the Sun Science

How RTGs Power Spacecraft Billions of Miles From the Sun

Radioisotope thermoelectric generators convert the heat of decaying plutonium-238 into electricity, enabling spacecraft like Voyager 1 to operate for...

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Did Mars Have an Ocean? What the Evidence Shows Science

Did Mars Have an Ocean? What the Evidence Shows

Scientists have debated whether Mars once held a vast northern ocean for nearly four decades. New geological evidence, including a continental shelf '...

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How the Antikythera Mechanism Works—the First Computer Science

How the Antikythera Mechanism Works—the First Computer

The Antikythera mechanism, a 2,100-year-old Greek device recovered from a shipwreck, used dozens of interlocking bronze gears to predict eclipses, tra...

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How Gravitational Lensing Works—the Universe's Telescope Science

How Gravitational Lensing Works—the Universe's Telescope

Gravitational lensing bends light from distant objects around massive cosmic structures, acting as nature's own telescope. This guide explains the thr...

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How NASA's Artemis Program Works—Moon to Mars Science

How NASA's Artemis Program Works—Moon to Mars

NASA's Artemis program aims to return humans to the Moon and eventually reach Mars, using the powerful SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft. Here's how the...

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How Supermassive Black Holes Wake Up After Millions of Years Science

How Supermassive Black Holes Wake Up After Millions of Years

Most supermassive black holes sit quietly at the centers of galaxies, but some reignite after millions of years of dormancy, launching jets that stret...

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What Is the Hubble Tension—and Why Cosmology Is in Crisis Science

What Is the Hubble Tension—and Why Cosmology Is in Crisis

Two reliable methods for measuring the universe's expansion rate give stubbornly different answers, and the gap is now so large that physicists suspec...

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How Sungrazing Comets Work—and Why Most Don't Survive Science

How Sungrazing Comets Work—and Why Most Don't Survive

Sungrazing comets plunge within thousands of kilometers of the Sun's surface, enduring extreme heat and tidal forces. Most disintegrate, but their des...

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How Spacecraft Splashdown Recovery Works Science

How Spacecraft Splashdown Recovery Works

From parachute deployment to Navy diver extraction, here is how space agencies recover astronauts and capsules from the ocean — a method used since th...

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How Atoms Could Detect Gravitational Waves Science

How Atoms Could Detect Gravitational Waves

Scientists propose a radical new method to sense gravitational waves by tracking how they shift the light atoms emit, potentially shrinking detectors...

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How Stellar Archaeology Works—and What Old Stars Reveal Science

How Stellar Archaeology Works—and What Old Stars Reveal

Stellar archaeology uses spectroscopy and chemical analysis to read the composition of ancient stars, unlocking secrets about the earliest era of the...

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How Dust Storms Create Electricity on Mars Science

How Dust Storms Create Electricity on Mars

Mars dust devils and storms generate static electricity strong enough to spark, reshaping the planet's chemistry and posing challenges for future miss...

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