Chris Lintott is a professor of astrophysics at Oxford and co-presenter of The Sky at Night. Asteroid 4937 is named after him.
It is very difficult to describe what I witnessed on Monday, 8 April, standing in a field in Ohio a little after three in the afternoon. As the shadow of the Moon swept across the surrounding cornfields, engulfing the crowd that had gathered to watch the total solar eclipse, we were transported, briefly, to a place unlike anywhere else on Earth. The transition from partial to total eclipse...
Before the Large Hadron Collider was turned on fifteen years ago, it was suggested that the particle accelerator might bring about the end of the Universe.
Where the Earth and the other rocky planets of the solar system orbit today, there were once, five billion years ago, more than twenty worlds larger than the Moon, several perhaps as large as Mars. Collisions were common. Rocks brought back from the Moon by the Apollo astronauts tell us that one of these worlds, often known as Theia, hit the still-forming Earth, destroying itself and...
The universe was born in light. If modern cosmology is right, for the first forty thousand years or so after the Big Bang the most important component in the young, hot universe was electromagnetic radiation, a situation that continued until the universe had cooled sufficiently for the first hydrogen and helium atoms to form. Temperatures were still high enough at that point for the cosmos...
Nasa’s Parker Solar Probe is now the fastest object ever built, hitting 101 miles per second as it passed within six million miles of the Sun last month, setting a record for the closest approach to our star on its tenth planned orbit. The views during its slingshots are spectacular, with Parker’s camera catching Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, the Milky Way and the Earth sliding past the window on a recent passage. These familiar objects are seen in an unfamiliar setting. The flickering light in the background is from the Sun’s outer atmosphere, the corona, through which Parker is flying. It is the first spacecraft to enter this region of tenuous hot gas, normally only visible from Earth during the special conditions of a total solar eclipse.
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