Reading Time: 4 minutes What was the Star of Bethlehem—a nova? A planet? A star? A comet? And can any of these explain, “the star … went ahead of [the magi] until it stopped over the place where the child was”?
astronomy
Posted inSpace
Can the Star of Bethlehem be scientifically verified?
Reading Time: 4 minutes Can we find astronomical evidence for the Star of Bethlehem? A popular video says we can.
Posted inSpace
New tech shatters previous model of Moon’s origin
Reading Time: 3 minutes A team of scientists at Durham University in the UK has flipped the chessboard of our longstanding consensus about the origin of the Moon. It was a story made to capture my attention. In high school English classes, I often lightly plagiarized the last line of Walt Whitman’s “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer.” Whitman’s […]
Posted inSpace
OnlySky LIVE: Astrophysicist Dr. Sanjana Curtis looks back at 45 days of Webb telescope
Reading Time: < 1 minute Friday, August 26 @ 7 pm ET • TikTok: @sanjanacurtis Join us live on TikTok for a conversation with Dr. Sanjana Curtis, a science communicator, advocate for underrepresented communities in science, and Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Chicago. We’ll be discussing and answering your questions about the […]
Posted inDeep Dive
How do we make astronomy more humanist?
Reading Time: 4 minutes While I wait for my early morning exercise class, I listen to the chatter of yellow-breasted bichofué, and watch a city worker use a long husk of palm branch to sweep the night’s detritus from the square. On my warmup run, I tuned into a local news podcast, for analysis of the new president’s first […]
Posted inSpace
My humanism comes from the stars
Reading Time: 7 minutes Our views of deep space, such as the new photos from the James Webb Space Telescope, can serve as the basis for a profoundly moral vision.
Posted inSpace
NASA’s Webb Telescope peers deep into the early universe
Reading Time: 2 minutes Nearly seven months after its launch, images taken by the James Webb Space Telescope were publicly released by NASA on Monday and Tuesday. The first image, released by President Biden on Monday, astounded scientists and math-phobes alike. This deep field snapshot of galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 provided a glimpse far back in time, revealing faint, […]
Posted inSpace
For all of humanity’s failings, we’ve never stopped wondering about the stars
Reading Time: 8 minutes It was an atypically dry English spring when a man in Bath scanned the skies with a 7-inch reflecting telescope he’d designed and built by hand, through painstaking refinements to Isaac Newton’s principles of optics. William Herschel was studying stellar parallax, the phenomenon that makes a nearby star look like it has moved in relation […]
Posted inScience
How science cheats women
Reading Time: 2 minutes Women have made many great scientific achievements, despite the sexist attitudes that tried to hold them back.
Posted inSpace
Look up or don’t look up: We probably won’t see the one that gets us
Reading Time: 3 minutes OnlySky · Look up or don’t look up—We probably won’t see the one that gets us | Dale McGowan Our planet is tracing an elliptical orbit around a middle-aged star in the outer arm of an average galaxy. It’s been doing that for six billion years and will continue doing that for another six billion, […]