When I built my first telescope, a 15cm reflector, it was in my back garden! Location was the least of my problems but imagine trying to do the same thing with a somewhat larger telescope at an altitude of 18,400 feet above sea level! The summit of Cerro Chajnantor in Chile’s Atacama Desert is higher

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The Sun’s outer atmosphere is trying to kill us, not literally of course but the corona, that wispy halo of superheated gas extending millions of kilometres into space, is the birthplace of solar flares and the violent particle storms that follow. Understanding exactly how those eruptions work requires watching them in X-rays, and watching them

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Stars are not the serene, unchanging beacons they appear to be. Over billions of years they swell, convulse, shed their outer layers and collapse into dense remnants. Throughout all of that drama, something appears to be surviving, something invisible, threaded through the stellar interior from the very beginning. A new study suggests that magnetic fields

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(This is Part 4 of a series on neutrinos, Majorana fermions, and one of the strangest open questions in physics. Read Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.) It’s 1937. One year before Ettore Majorana vanishes. He is sitting with Dirac’s framework — the precise, picture-perfect vision of quantum mechanics — and doing what very

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NASA and other space agencies are intent on sending astronauts back to the Moon, and this time, to stay! A vital part of these plans for reducing costs and dependency on Earth is the process of In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU), using local resources for construction materials and meeting astronauts’ basic needs. This is why the

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They pass through you at a rate of around a hundred trillion every second, that’s about 12 quadrillion while you read this article, depending on how fast you read of course! You won’t feel a thing though since neutrinos are so reluctant to interact with ordinary matter that the entire Earth, and you too, are

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The lunar south pole looks chaotic from orbit. Craters heaped upon craters, ancient basins, scarps and slopes tumbling in every direction, it is without doubt, one of the most geologically complicated terrains in the inner Solar System. That aside, it’s exactly where we intend to send people since understanding what lies beneath that battered surface

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SN 2025mkn is a Type II supernova and it wasn’t supposed to be visible at all. The violent death of a massive star that had exhausted its nuclear fuel and collapsed under its own gravity sits at a redshift of 1.371. That places it roughly nine billion light years away. At that distance, an ordinary

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Earth and the course of life on Earth have been shaped by impacts. Scientists have uncovered links between massive impacts and changes in climate that altered the planet forever. But the further scientists look into the past to try to understand these changes, the more difficult it is to link them together. Impact craters don’t

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(This is Part 3 of a series on neutrinos, Majorana fermions, and one of the strangest open questions in physics. Read Part 1 and Part 2.) Neutrinos have mass. We know this. And massive particles — ALL massive particles, as we established in Part 1 — flicker between left- and right-handed states. That flickering IS

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