thanhtoong0

thanhtoong0

Betelgeuse and the Crab Nebula Reveal Stellar Death and Rebirth in Multi-Telescope Views

Betelgeuse’s unusual dimming and the Crab Nebula’s remnants offer insight into stellar death and rebirth. Composite images from multiple telescopes show gas filaments and a neutron star, illustrating how massive stars explode, enrich space with heavy elements, and seed future star formation. These observations help scientists trace stellar life cycles in the unive...

There’s a new space race – will the billionaires win?

The commercialisation of the cosmos is already underway, and our current laws aren’t fit for purpose

If there is one thing we can rely on in this world, it is human hubris, and space and astronomy are no exception.

The ancients believed that everything revolved around Earth. In the 16th century, Copernicus and his peers overturned that view with the heliocentric model. Since then, telescopes and spacecraft have revealed just how insignificant we are. There are hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way, each star a sun like ours, many with planets orbiting them. In 1995, the Hubble space telescope captured its first deep-field image: this showed us that there are hundreds of billions of galaxies in our known universe, huge wheeling collections of stars dispersed through space.

Continue reading...

Not just love, actually: why romance fiction is booming

From Emily Henry to Rebecca Yarros and Alison Espach’s The Wedding People – romance has dominated the book charts this year. So why is it still dismissed by critics?

People buy lipstick when the world is falling apart. This genuine economic theory, known as the “lipstick index”, was first noted by Leonard Lauder (son of the more famous Estée). When the world seems very bleak – in the weeks and months after the twin towers fell, for instance, or after the 2008 financial crash – and spending generally goes down, lipstick sales trend strongly upwards.

The psychological truth at the heart of this equation is real: when people have less than they need, they spend more on small, beautiful things. It’s easy, maybe, to dismiss this in the way most feminine-coded things are dismissed: frivolous, wasteful, foolish. But that would be a mistake. A single treasure, bright and gorgeous, is like a talisman; a candle in the night. It is possible, with your small candle, to make your way in the darkness. One delight, against all this. The world crumbles, and lipstick sales go up.

Continue reading...