Light sources

Hong Kong at night. Not ideal for stargazing.Photo: Lam Yik Fei (Getty Images)A team of researchers investigating tens of thousands of citizen science observations of the night sky found that stars in the night sky are rapidly becoming harder to see due to human light pollution.The team pored over 51,351 observations made around the world from 2011 to 2022 as part of the Globe at Night project run by NOIRLab. They found that stars are becoming harder to see, which the researchers suggest is due to the proliferation of…

A team of astronomers studying the gas surrounding a distant quasar believe it may carry remnants of one of the universe’s first stars.The first stars are known as Population III stars (the three star populations were named in the order they were observed, so the Population III stars are counterintuitively the earliest). These oldest stars are hypothetical at the moment and presumed long gone, as they would have been hundreds of times the mass of the Sun and would have burned out quickly. None have ever been observed, but…

Image: Shutterstock (Shutterstock)A new study this week suggests that long-term exposure to blue light may not be so harmless, at least for fruit flies. Researchers found that chronic blue light exposure prematurely aged the flies and damaged their brains, likely due to certain metabolic changes. But it’s not known whether blue light could cause similar harm in humans, and the exposure people get from phone screens and indoor lighting isn’t likely to be worse than the blue light naturally present in sunshine.02:5710…

Northern Lights seen from the coast of Scotland in February, 2021.Photo: Peter Summers (Getty Images)If you happen to live on the northern end of the U.S., and you’re not completely engulfed by ambient light pollution, you might be in for a once-in-a-lifetime celestial light show, though a lot of things have to happen to make the aurora borealis, often called the Northern Lights, appear overhead.This disturbance in the night sky is being called by a coronal mass ejection, otherwise known as a CME. These range in severity…

Illustration: ESA/Gaia/DPAC/CU6It wasn’t all stars for Gaia’s third dataset. The space observatory also mapped the orbit of more than 150,000 asteroids, from the inner parts of the solar system all the way out to the Trojan asteroids that trail behind, and lead in front of, Jupiter. The different types of asteroids are indicated by different colors.The yellow dot at the center of the illustration is the Sun, while the blue represents the inner part of the solar system,with its rocky planets Mercury, Venus, Earth, and…