Astronomy

96 articles with this tag

How Pulsars Work—the Universe's Cosmic Lighthouses Science

How Pulsars Work—the Universe's Cosmic Lighthouses

Pulsars are rapidly spinning neutron stars that sweep beams of radiation across space like cosmic lighthouses. Here is how they form, why they tick wi...

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How Lightning Works on Jupiter—and Why It's So Extreme Science

How Lightning Works on Jupiter—and Why It's So Extreme

Jupiter produces lightning bolts up to a million times more powerful than Earth's. From ammonia mushballs to stealth superstorms, here is how the gas...

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How Ice Melt Slows Earth's Spin—and Warps Time Science

How Ice Melt Slows Earth's Spin—and Warps Time

Melting polar ice redistributes mass from the poles to the equator, slowing Earth's rotation and lengthening days by milliseconds per century—with rea...

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How Nuclear Propulsion Works in Space Science

How Nuclear Propulsion Works in Space

Nuclear propulsion promises to cut Mars travel time in half by using fission reactors to power spacecraft, offering far greater efficiency than chemic...

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How Lunar Bases Work—and What It Takes to Build One Science

How Lunar Bases Work—and What It Takes to Build One

Building a permanent outpost on the Moon requires solving extreme challenges from radiation and temperature swings to construction with local soil. He...

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What Are Red Giant Stars and How Do They Form? Science

What Are Red Giant Stars and How Do They Form?

Red giants are enormous, cool stars in a late stage of stellar evolution. When a star exhausts its hydrogen fuel, its core contracts while its outer l...

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What Are Rogue Planets and How Do They Form? Science

What Are Rogue Planets and How Do They Form?

Billions of planets drift through the Milky Way without orbiting any star. Here's how these rogue worlds form, how scientists detect them, and why som...

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What Are Super-Puff Planets and How Do They Form? Science

What Are Super-Puff Planets and How Do They Form?

Super-puff exoplanets have the density of cotton candy despite being nearly the size of Jupiter. Scientists are using the James Webb Space Telescope t...

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How Meteor Fireballs Work—and Why They Boom Science

How Meteor Fireballs Work—and Why They Boom

Every day, thousands of fireballs blaze through Earth's atmosphere. Here's the science behind how space rocks become blazing streaks of light—and why...

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What Are Jellyfish Galaxies and How Do They Form? Science

What Are Jellyfish Galaxies and How Do They Form?

Jellyfish galaxies trail long tentacles of gas and newborn stars as they hurtle through galaxy clusters. Here is how ram-pressure stripping creates th...

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How Comets Break Apart—and What Scientists Learn Science

How Comets Break Apart—and What Scientists Learn

Comets are fragile relics of the early solar system. When they fragment, scientists gain rare access to pristine material billions of years old, revea...

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How Scientists Read Exoplanet Atmospheres From Light Science

How Scientists Read Exoplanet Atmospheres From Light

Transit spectroscopy lets astronomers decode the chemical makeup of distant worlds by analyzing starlight filtered through their atmospheres — a techn...

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