#2026-astronomy

#2026-astronomy

"The worst place to live on Earth is actually the safest place to live on another planet," he adds.

The precise expansion rate of the universe - called the Hubble constant - has turned into a major pain point as attempts to nail it down keep leading to widely differing figures.

Citizen Science Month is built around a goal of 2.5 million 'Acts of Science,' tying the annual event to America's 250th birthday through a simple but powerful idea: lots of small contributions can add up to something really meaningful.

Looking skyward fills us with wonder. Off-world, the Sun, planets, stars, and galaxies all await. Our Solar System encompasses our own cosmic backyard. Farther away, stars and star clusters abound within the Milky Way. Hundreds of billions of stars exist just within our home galaxy. Inside our Local Group, only Andromeda surpasses us in mass, size, and stars. More than 5 million light-years away, galaxies abound in groups and clusters.

"we were all in tears"

One of the most exciting aspects is the rich chemistry we detect. We see dozens of different molecules, including some complex organic molecules that contain carbon, the same element that forms the basis of life on Earth. From ACES, we are learning more about how the ingredients for planets, and potentially life itself, can arise in the universe.

The Hubble Space Telescope displayed what the Universe looks like. Its successor, JWST, now reveals how the Universe grew up. Galaxies formed and grew massive swiftly: requiring under 300 million years. Larger-scale, more massive structures, like galaxy clusters, take longer. The earliest mature, fully-fledged cluster is CL J1001+0220. Simulations predict such clusters to appear late: after 2-3 billion years. However, proto-clusters, or still-forming galaxy clusters, appear far earlier.

The universe is exploding. Or parts of it are. The night sky may seem calm, even serene, but that masks events of a catastrophic and nearly unimaginable scale. Across the galaxy and even the cosmos itself, immense outbursts of energy occur that could easily vaporize our planet. Happily, space is vast, and the terrible distance between these events and us diminishes what we see to a faint glowusually.

There is a profound, quiet magic in standing alone under a truly dark sky, but the experience becomes something else entirely when shared with a community of fellow explorers. Star parties are the heartbeat of this experience: communal, high-energy gatherings where everyone from veteran astronomers to total beginners can share a wide-angle view of the cosmos. It's a chance to level up your astrophotography skills, learn the latest in deep-space science from experts,

Okay, first thing first: the universe is in fact expanding. We've known this for more than a century now, and it's the basis for modern cosmology. This idea is called the big bang modelwhich is an unfortunate name because it brings to mind a cosmos expanding like an explosion, with galaxies moving away from each other through space like shrapnel. But in fact space itself is expanding, and that's different.

This system is truly extraordinary. We're seeing the radio equivalent of a laser halfway across the universe. Fundamentally, masers and lasers are focused beams of light in the same frequency. In the realm of astrophysics, these can arise from clouds of dust being excited into a higher energy state from the light emitted by other sources, like stars and black holes.