• Space Great Attractor Something invisible is dragging our entire galaxy across the universe at hundreds of kilometers per second, and for… 3 min read · 10 facts
• Space Boötes Void Astronomers pointed their instruments at a patch of sky near the constellation Boötes expecting thousands of galaxies… 3 min read · 10 facts
• Space Voyager Golden Record In 1977, a small team with six weeks and $1,500 pressed humanity's greatest hits onto two golden disks — then hurled… 3 min read · 9 facts
• Space Wow! signal In 1977 a radio telescope caught a 72-second burst from deep space so strong that the astronomer who found it scrawled… 3 min read · 9 facts
• Space Laika A stray from the streets of Moscow became the first living creature to orbit Earth — on a mission everyone knew she… 4 min read · 9 facts
• Space Pale Blue Dot The most humbling photograph ever taken almost didn't happen. From 6 billion kilometers away, Voyager 1 turned around… 3 min read · 9 facts
• Space ʻOumuamua In 2017 a cigar-shaped visitor from another star tumbled through our Solar System, accelerated without a tail, and… 3 min read · 9 facts
• Space Tabby's Star A star 1,470 light-years away keeps dimming by up to 22% in patterns nothing in astronomy fully explains — and for a… 3 min read · 9 facts
• Space Kessler syndrome In 1978 a NASA scientist predicted that space junk could one day breed more space junk in a runaway chain reaction —… 3 min read · 9 facts
• Space Enceladus Saturn's small snow-white moon is firing its hidden ocean into space through cracks in its ice — and that ocean… 3 min read · 10 facts
• Space Planet Nine Something seems to be shepherding the most distant objects in our Solar System into strange aligned orbits. The best… 3 min read · 9 facts
• Space Fermi paradox The galaxy holds hundreds of billions of stars and is billions of years old — so where is everybody? A physicist's… 3 min read · 9 facts
• Space Black Hole They were dismissed as a mathematical curiosity for forty years. There is now one at the centre of our galaxy weighing… 3 min read · 10 facts
• Space James Webb Space Telescope Its mirror is gold-plated, folded like origami to fit in a rocket, and must stay below −223 °C. It cost $10 billion… 3 min read · 10 facts
• Space The Sun It converts four billion kilograms of matter into pure energy every second, makes up 99.86% of everything in the Solar… 3 min read · 10 facts
• Space Solar System The Sun is not the biggest thing in the Solar System. It is 99.86% of it. Everything else, every planet, moon… 3 min read · 9 facts
• Space Olympus Mons: The Volcano That Dwarfs Everest Mars hides a volcano two and a half times taller than Everest and roughly the size of Italy. Its slopes are so gentle… 3 min read · 8 facts
• Space Pulsar In 1967 a PhD student found a signal ticking every 1.337 seconds so precisely that her team half-jokingly labelled it… 4 min read · 10 facts
• Space Moon You have never seen one side of it, it is made largely of shredded Earth, and the fact that it exactly covers the Sun… 4 min read · 10 facts
• Space Saturn Saturn is the only planet in the Solar System less dense than water. Drop it in a big enough ocean and it would float… 4 min read · 10 facts
• Space Solar eclipse Total eclipses happen somewhere on Earth every 18 months, but any given spot waits 360 to 410 years for one. And most… 4 min read · 11 facts
• Space International Space Station People have lived on it without a single day's break since November 2000. It laps the planet every 93 minutes, so its… 4 min read · 10 facts
• Space Halley's Comet People have recorded Halley's Comet for more than 2,000 years, but nobody realised it was the same comet coming back… 4 min read · 10 facts
• Space Jupiter Jupiter has two and a half times the mass of all the other planets in the Solar System put together, and a storm… 4 min read · 10 facts
• Space Venus Venus is almost the same size as Earth and about as different as a planet can get. A day there lasts longer than a… 4 min read · 10 facts
• Space Hubble Space Telescope Hubble reached orbit in 1990 with a mirror ground to the wrong shape. The fix was a set of spectacles, installed by… 4 min read · 10 facts
• Space Supernova A dying star that briefly outshines its entire galaxy. One seen in 1054 was recorded by Chinese astronomers and left… 4 min read · 10 facts
• Space Big Bang We know the age of the universe to within twenty million years, and the clinching evidence was stumbled on by accident… 4 min read · 9 facts
• Space Earth Of everything astronomers have ever studied, only one world is known to hold life, and it is the one under your feet… 4 min read · 9 facts
• Space Titan (moon) There is only one place besides Earth where rain falls into rivers and fills lakes and seas. The catch: it rains… 3 min read · 10 facts
• Space Milky Way Our galaxy holds up to 400 billion stars, has a giant black hole at its heart, and takes 240 million years to spin… 3 min read · 10 facts
• Space Neptune Neptune is the only planet found with maths before anyone spotted it on purpose. It also has the fastest winds in the… 4 min read · 10 facts
• Space Mercury (planet) On Mercury, one sunrise to the next takes about 176 Earth days, twice as long as its whole year. Meet the small… 5 min read · 10 facts
• Space Uranus On Uranus, a pole can get 42 years of nonstop sunlight and then 42 years of darkness. Why does this planet roll around… 5 min read · 10 facts
• Space Great Red Spot Jupiter's Great Red Spot is a storm that was once about three times wider than Earth, and people have been watching it… 4 min read · 10 facts
• Space Neutron star A matchbox of neutron star material would weigh about 3 billion tonnes. Meet the tiny collapsed stars that spin… 5 min read · 10 facts
• Space Meteorite One crashed through a roof and landed on a bed. Others are older than any rock on Earth, and a few come from Mars. 4 min read · 10 facts
• Space Asteroid belt Popular pictures show a crowded field of tumbling rocks. In real life, spacecraft cruise straight through, and the… 4 min read · 10 facts
• Space SpaceX Three failed launches nearly bankrupted it. Eighteen years later it floated for 86 billion dollars, the largest stock… 3 min read · 9 facts
• Space Exoplanet The first clue to a planet around another star was photographed in 1917, and nobody noticed for almost a century… 4 min read · 10 facts
• Space Comet A comet's core can be darker than asphalt, yet its glowing cloud once grew bigger than the Sun. In 1910, worried… 5 min read · 10 facts
• Space Space suit The Apollo Moon suit had eleven layers, built to handle temperatures from minus 156 °C to 121 °C and tiny space… 5 min read · 10 facts
• Space Space Shuttle Seconds before every Space Shuttle liftoff, its engines tipped the whole rocket stack about 65 centimeters, a sway… 4 min read · 10 facts
• Space Kuiper belt Past Neptune lies a frozen ring 20 times wider than the asteroid belt, and spotting its first new member took two… 5 min read · 10 facts
• Space Dark matter About 85% of all the matter in the universe is something no one has ever seen or caught in a detector, yet its gravity… 4 min read · 10 facts
• Space Rings of Saturn Saturn's rings are almost pure water ice, may be only 10 to 100 million years old, and are raining down into the… 5 min read · 10 facts
• Space Wormhole A wormhole could get you somewhere faster than a light beam traveling outside it. Yet a light beam sent through the… 4 min read · 10 facts
• Space Red giant In about 5 billion years the Sun will swell to over 200 times its current size and likely swallow Earth, and giant… 4 min read · 10 facts
• Space Solar wind The Sun blows away more than a million tonnes of itself every second. The scientist who predicted this wind was told… 4 min read · 10 facts
• Space Meteor shower During the great Leonid storm of 1833, one estimate put the peak at over 100,000 meteors an hour, and most of these… 4 min read · 10 facts
• Space Lagrange point There are five spots in space where a spacecraft can hover in step with Earth while burning barely any fuel, and… 4 min read · 10 facts
• Space Cosmic ray In 1991, a single particle from space hit Earth carrying as much energy as a baseball flying at 90 km/h. Smaller… 4 min read · 10 facts