Imagine being completely, utterly alone. Surrounded by no planets, no stars, no galaxies. Not a single scrap of matter – not even a hydrogen atom – within hundreds of millions of lightyears. Welcome to the loneliest place in the cosmos: the great cosmic voids.
What, exactly, is a “planet”? For ancient astronomers it was pretty easy. When they stared up at the night sky, they saw a) the sun, b) the moon, c) a lot of fixed stars, d) a few wandering points of light. Those vagabonds were the planets. Indeed, our word planet comes from the Greek word for “wanderer”.
Space travel isn’t just for NASA astronauts now. How did we get here, and what is next in the incredible race to space? SPACE TITANS: MUSK, BEZOS, BRANSON, an all-new special streaming Thursday, November 4 on discovery+, will follow the world’s most successful entrepreneurs who are putting billions of dollars on the line to launch a revolution in space.
My first expedition to Mojave National Preserve, California, was an epic adventure that felt ripped right off the pages of an Indiana Jones movie. An ancient cave in an unassuming desert landscape that at high noon, reveals shafts of light into a soft, sandy cave, like an underground sundial.
It sounds super-scary: something from outside the universe, a force so unimaginable, is pulling every single galaxy towards it. What monstrosity of cosmic physics could it be?
The Milky Way is a giant, magnificent, truly transcendently beautiful spiral arm galaxy. It’s too bad we can’t get a decent picture of it. The problem is that we live inside it, and so astronomers have to work extra-hard to construct an accurate map.
By scaling the 29,032-foot-peak, Full Circle Everest hopes to empower people of color to explore the outdoors.
On the morning of October 13, William Shatner joined the crew of New Shepard for its second crewed flight, NS-18. Due to a few holds, the scheduled 10A liftoff was delayed by about 50 minutes from Blue Origin's Launch Site One in Texas. Despite the delays, liftoff and touchdown went off without a hitch, making Star Trek star William Shatner the oldest man to go to space.
The Star Trek star will become the oldest person to go to space when he launches aboard a Blue Origin rocket on Wednesday, October 13. Watch live coverage on Space Launch LIVE: Shatner in Space on Discovery and Science Channel starting at 8:30A ET with liftoff scheduled for 10A ET.
New footage shows a sleeping octopus changing colors, indicating the creature may be dreaming.
Transport is undergoing a massive transformation so it can meet society’s demands for a low-carbon economy. Introducing electric vehicles (EVs) and declining gasoline and diesel use are helping, but zero-carbon hydrogen can speed up both the transition and long-term decarbonization of transport.
A four-time champion, 480 Otis proved that age is just a number and appetite is the real judge of awesomeness.
On the last day of September, an unlikely patient received a COVID-19 vaccination. Jimiyu, a 29-year-old male chimpanzee living at Saint Louis Zoo in Missouri, became the first animal at the zoo to receive a dose of Zoetis.
Our universe is home to up to two trillion galaxies, with each galaxy hosting hundreds of billions of stars. That’s…a lot of stars. Each one a ball of fearsome energies, powered by the nuclear fusion of fundamental elements in their hearts. Each one pouring out light into the empty cosmos, illuminating our universe for our wonder and delight.
Glaciers store a vast amount of important climate data within their frozen rivers of snow and ice. But many of the world’’s 220,000 glaciers are under threat from global warming and are melting at an accelerating rate. Now scientists are in a race to gather long-frozen records of Earth’s past climate from the ice.