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There is a region of space called the Bo'tes void, around 330 million light years wide and almost completely empty, and if our galaxy sat at its centre, we might not have discovered that other galaxies existed until well into the twentieth century.
1+ hour, 22+ min ago (462+ words) In the direction of the constellation Bo'tes there is a roughly spherical region of space, around 330 million light-years across, in which almost nothing is found. Published May 30, 2026 In the direction of the constellation Bo'tes there is a roughly spherical region…...
The surface of the Sun is around 5, 500 degrees, but its outer atmosphere is more than a million degrees hotter, and after decades of work physicists still cannot fully explain how the cooler layer heats the one above it.
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Astronomers have found a cloud of water vapour around a distant quasar holding something like 140 trillion times all the water in Earth's oceans, the largest reservoir of water ever discovered anywhere in the universe.
7+ hour, 32+ min ago (386+ words) In July 2011, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory announced that two teams of astronomers had detected an enormous mass of water vapour around a quasar called APM 08279+5255, more than 12 billion light-years away. Published May 29, 2026 The figure is real and the finding is…...
NASA's next major space telescope, the Nancy Grace Roman, is expected to find roughly 100, 000 new transiting planets in just five years " along with the largest catalogue ever assembled of rogue worlds drifting through the galaxy without a star to orbit
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The James Webb Space Telescope has just captured the first direct measurement of a black hole 50 million times the mass of the Sun, sitting in an ancient galaxy where it outweighs every star around it " suggesting it may have formed first
17+ hour, 47+ min ago (1221+ words) According to the official ESA Webb announcement on 27 May 2026, two papers published the same day, one in Nature and a companion in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, report the first direct mass measurement of a supermassive black hole…...
When NASA deliberately crashed Apollo hardware into the Moon, the seismometers left behind recorded vibrations for nearly an hour " as if the Moon itself were ringing like a bell
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A pair of American satellites built to catch the Soviets cheating on a nuclear test ban kept detecting unexplained flashes, and the flashes turned out to be the most powerful explosions in the universe coming from billions of light-years away
22+ hour, 33+ min ago (531+ words) In the late 1960s, a set of United States satellites built to watch for clandestine nuclear weapons tests began recording brief flashes of gamma radiation that matched no bomb. Published May 29, 2026 The satellites were the Vela series, and the episode is…...
In 1987 a star exploded in a nearby galaxy, and detectors deep underground caught the burst of neutrinos roughly three hours before any telescope on Earth saw the light arrive.
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New evidence suggests Saturn's rings are younger than the dinosaurs " and for most of the planet's history, the Saturn you picture may never have existed
1+ day, 12+ hour ago (245+ words) The headline claim, in the form it usually arrives, is that Saturn's rings are around 400 million years old. Published May 28, 2026 That is a range, not a number. It also measures exposure time, not necessarily the rings" age in the strict…...
The gold in an ordinary wedding ring was not made on Earth, or even inside an ordinary star, but in the most violent events in the universe, the collisions of dead stars and the flares of magnetised neutron stars, long before the Sun was born and the cloud that became our solar system took shape.
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