We tend to think of a decade as a long time. Astrophysicists? Not so much. The telescopes and space-based observatories they use can peer back billions of years. The planning required to build ... read more
We spent a century hunting for gravitational waves, until the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory finally detected them in 2015. Now astrophysicists from the European Space Agency ... read more
How do you take a close-up shot of Jupiter? With an 8,000 pound spacecraft, a five-year journey, and a small piece of specialty glass. That’s how the Juno probe, in the early morning hours of ... read more
1891 was a year of invention and discovery. The Wrigley Company launched what would become a gum empire, Thomas Edison patented the motion picture camera, James Naismith thought up basketball, and ... read more
We think of barren mountaintops, desert valleys, and dark ocean depths as the world’s most extreme environments. But the man-made world has harsh conditions of its own. Think battlefields, oil ... read more
The great astronomers of the past formulated theories and developed new ideas with simple lenses in their telescopes. Eventually, science and industrial communities partnered to develop more ... read more
In the heart of the Texas desert, an optical telescope is on a mission to spot the invisible. The Hobby-Eberly Telescope, located at The University of Texas McDonald Observatory, is the world’s ... read more
