#astronomy

#astronomy

"Everything else disappeared," she told Giz, "even the bright central black hole, and only this little dot remained."

In the summer of 1999, I was a 19-year-old with an interest in astronomy, but no real idea of what I wanted to do with my life - then I saw my first total solar eclipse.

These discoveries show that the building blocks for forming planets can be found even around objects that are barely larger than Jupiter and drifting alone in space.

Light echoes occur when a massive star detonates, creating a flash of light that expands rapidly. This light defines a spherical shell around the explosion.

A rare planetary alignment will occur on August 10, involving Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune visible in an arc in the night sky.

The International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service has predicted that July 22 could come out about a millisecond short of a standard 24-hour spin.

The James Webb Space Telescope and ALMA have observed the protostar HOPS-315, revealing the early moments of planetary creation in a protoplanetary disk about 1,400 light-years away in Orion.

The collision occurred 38 million years ago, but only now is it being picked up by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

Open clusters of stars, which consist of dozens up to a few thousand stars, are useful for studying the Universe because they formed more or less at the same time.

In horror fiction, a zombie is a human ghost or spirit "somewhere between living and dead, puppeted by external forces". This book explores real zombies in the natural world: organisms that lose control to exploitative parasites as seen in a tropical wasp that paralyses a cockroach, leading to its consumption by the wasp's young. This concept may extend to humans being susceptible to 'zombie bugs'.

On the evenings of July 3-4, Mercury will reach its eastern elongation, appearing above the western horizon soon after sunset, with orange-tinged Mars above it.