Far beyond Neptune, the solar system stops behaving quite the way astronomers expect. Small frozen worlds travel around the Sun on enormous stretched-out paths, some taking thousands of years to complete a single orbit. A few of the most distant objects seem to point in strangely similar directions, as though…
About 15,000 light-years from Earth, something in our galaxy keeps switching on. For roughly two minutes, it becomes incredibly bright in radio waves, gives off X-rays on almost the same schedule, fades away, and stays quiet until the whole thing begins again. The cycle takes about 44 minutes, and astronomers can…
On October 19, 2017, astronomer Robert Weryk noticed a faint object racing through telescope images from Hawaii. Its path immediately stood out because it was moving too fast to remain trapped by the Sun. Whatever it was, it had arrived from somewhere beyond our solar system. Astronomers named it 1I/2017 U1 ‘Oumuamua.…