The night sky, both beautiful and mysterious, has been the subject of campfire stories, ancient myths, and awe for as long as there have been people. A desire to comprehend the universe may well be humanity's oldest shared intellectual experience. Yet only recently have we truly begun to grasp our place in the vast cosmos. […]
There are places in the Universe where the night sky has no constellations. No Orion, no Saucepan. Nothing but a few lonely, far away stars and some faint, ghostly patches of light. Almost all stars lie within the crowded boundaries of huge galaxies, travelling with their brothers and sisters as a vast galactic family. But […]
Discover spectroscopy, the science of light, and learn how scientists study the Universe by deciphering clues hidden in light arriving from distant objects. The Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS) is an instrument on the Hubble Space Telescope designed to analyze ultraviolet light from very distant, faint objects. COS allows us to learn about the origins of the […]