Saturn’s lightning 10,000 times more powerful than Earth’s

I love being in the middle of a thunderstorm - being in the center of the light, noise and heavy rain is a really exhilarating experience. But new research from NASA’s Cassini probe makes me think that maybe Saturn would be an even better place to experience a massive storm.
Why? Saturn’s storms not only have [...]

Where is the brightest place on Earth?

Where’s the brightest place on Earth - the place that is illuminated most when the Sun has gone down? New York’s Times Square perhaps… what about the glow of office lights around London’s business district… or maybe the bustling heart of Mumbai, the world’s most populated city. They’re all pretty bright, but of course nothing [...]

Traveling back in time with Wikipedia

It’s over 500 years since Johannes Gutenberg invented his famous printing press - something which had actually been around centuries earlier in China and Korea. Nowadays the internet is fast replacing old-fashioned books as the way to find things out.
But now Wikipedia is doing some time travel, going back a few centuries to produce [...]

NASA’s new image of the stars that shouldn’t exist

Beautiful, isn’t it? But I think it also looks a bit weird compared to most galaxies. Lots of scientists think it’s strange too, although not just because of what it looks like.
Until now it was thought that the majority of stars always form in the centers of galaxies, because that’s where most of the star-forming [...]

NASA’s twins that could save our world

Imagine a billion tonnes of scorching hot gas and radiation being hurled toward you - it’s not the sort of thing you come across every day.
This is actually something our Sun does on a regular basis, although fortunately for us our atmosphere stops anything too dangerous getting in and hurting us.
But satellites, as well [...]