Lyman spitzer

In the 17th century, the great maritime nations were vying to solve a puzzle that had confounded philosophers for many centuries: how to determine exact positions on the Earth’s surface. And in Britai

On the morning of Sunday, 3 September 1916, farm bailiff Charles Lewis set out across the fields at Abbott’s Hall near the village of Horsley Cross, in rural Essex, to check on the wheat crop. He took

This October marks 50 years since a heavily shielded spacecraft, the Soviet Union’s Venera 9, parachuted into the atmosphere of Venus. Then, having landed, it did something extraordinary: it beamed ba

Astronomers love a challenge. They place their observatories on the highest mountains, in the driest deserts, on the coldest ice shelves, beneath the deepest oceans, in orbit around Earth and the Sun,

Ten years ago, on 14 September 2015, a new window on the Universe was opened, giving us a novel way of studying exotic, high-energy objects such as black holes and neutron stars: the first direct dete

New Horizons was the first mission sent to explore Pluto, conducting a fly-by in July 2015. It was then redirected for a close pass of a much smaller Kuiper Belt object, Arrokoth, in January 2019. Tod