The World’s Oldest Observatory

An arrangement of rocks in a secret location in Victoria, Australia is believed to be the world’s oldest observatory—mapping the movement of the sun throughout the year. Not only is it believed to pre-date Stonehenge and the Great Pyramids of Giza, this stone arrangement also disproves the belief that Indigenous Australians were purely hunters and gatherers; to track this movement, they would have had to …

Hubble’s Beautiful Close-Up Image of the Crab Nebula

In yet another image and discovery that are difficult to comprehend fully, NASA has delved into the core of Taurus’ Crab Nebula—via the Hubble Telescope—and released an up-close image that shows the left-overs of a supernova. The glistening, colorful picture shows a neutron star in the middle of the nebula that’s “about the same mass as the sun but compressed into an incredibly dense sphere …

How Astronomers are Hunting Ancient Stars

At 4.6 billion years old, our beloved Sun is considered young when compared with the 13-billion-year-old stars that occupy the furthest reaches of our galaxy. Those stars, called “pristine” by astronomers, took shape just 300 million years after the Big Bang and are recognizable by a lighter metallic composition. Various teams of astronomers are currently on the hunt for these stars, looking into the night …