Galaxy Chronicle

Supermoon: What It Really Is, Why It Happens, and When to Catch the Next One

A supermoon is a full moon that lines up with the Moon's closest approach to Earth, making it look a little bigger and noticeably brighter than an ordinary full moon. At its best, a supermoon can appear up to 14% larger and about 30%...

What Is a Constellation? A Beginner’s Guide to the Sky’s 88 Star Patterns

A constellation is a group of stars that forms a recognizable pattern in the night sky, one we've given a name, usually after a mythological figure, animal, or object. There are 88 of them officially recognized, and together they map out the entire sky....
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Jupiter’s Most Volcanic Moon Turns Out to Be Weirdly Fluffy

Io looks like it should be one of the toughest, densest places in the...

She Measured the Universe. Nobody Let Her Touch a Telescope.

Henrietta Leavitt spent her career at Harvard doing work considered too tedious for the...

For the First Time Ever, Something Watched Earth Disappear From Another World

At around 7 p.m. local time on Mars, on a dusty rim overlooking Jezero...

Something in Cygnus Is Flinging Particles to Energies We Can Barely Comprehend, and Nobody’s Sure What

Stretched across roughly six degrees of sky, about the width of twelve full Moons...

Einstein Said This Would Never Be Detected. He Was Off by 100 Years.

At 5:51 a.m. Eastern time on September 14, 2015, a signal lasting a quarter...

This Asteroid Has Been Watched for 169 Years, and It Just Turned Out to Be Three Rocks Wearing a Trench Coat

Asteroid 44 Nysa has been sitting in astronomers' sights since 1857, bright, big, and...

Our Neighboring Galaxy Is Slowing Down, and Nobody’s Quite Sure Why

Andromeda has been humanity's most-watched galaxy for over a century, close enough to spot...

The Farm Boy Who Built a Telescope Out of a Buick and Found a Planet

A hailstorm wrecked the Tombaugh family's Kansas crops in the 1920s, wiping out any...

The Photo Nobody at NASA Wanted to Take

By February 1990, Voyager 1 had already done its job. It had flown past...

Astronomers Just Caught a Star’s Death in Its First Second, Only the Second Time Ever

At 12:30 p.m. UTC on March 21, 2026, a Chinese space telescope called the...

The Black Hole That Was Never Supposed to Be Found

It was a Saturday in November 2025 when an algorithm flagged something strange in...

The Night Somebody Wrote “Wow!” in the Margin of a Printout

Late on the night of August 15, 1977, a radio telescope shaped like three...

Latest articles

Supermoon: What It Really Is, Why It Happens, and When to Catch the Next One

A supermoon is a full moon that lines up with the Moon's closest approach...

What Is a Constellation? A Beginner’s Guide to the Sky’s 88 Star Patterns

A constellation is a group of stars that forms a recognizable pattern in the...

How Many Planets Are There? The Real Answer Is Bigger Than Eight

There are eight planets in our solar system: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn,...

What Is a Galaxy? A Simple Guide to the Great Islands of Stars

A galaxy is an enormous collection of stars, gas, dust, and dark matter, all...