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Majestic photographs of the world's major telescopes

18 January 2023

Photographer Julian Abrams' new project, Everything Beautiful Is Far Away, celebrates some key telescopes from around the world – and the impressive structures that house them

Researchers at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory are nearly done with the LSST Camera, the world's largest digital camera ever built for astronomy. Roughly the size of a small car and weighing in at three tons, the camera features a five-foot wide front lens and a 3,200 megapixel sensor that will be cooled to -100??C to reduce noise. Once complete and in place atop the Vera C. Rubin Observatory's Simonyi Survey Telescope in Chile, the camera will survey the southern night sky for a decade, creating a trove of data that scientists will pore over to better understand some of the universe's biggest mysteries, including the nature of dark energy and dark matter. (Jacqueline Ramseyer Orrell/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory)

Astronomers have unveiled the world’s largest digital camera

26 October 2022

The world’s largest digital camera for astronomy is taller than a car, has as many pixels as 266 iPhones and will, over the course of the next 10 years, help researchers study billions of galaxies

I'm a space archaeologist studying junk strewn across the solar system

29 April 2020

From vintage satellites to lunar rovers, space archaeologist Alice Gorman is teasing out a unique history of humanity from the objects we've dispatched from Earth

Quiz of the year: Test your knowledge of 2019's science stories

18 December 2019

How do you revive a burned koala? How many microplastics does a teabag release? Find out how well you've been paying attention with our fun festive quiz

UK space academy boss Anu Ojha on what finding aliens might mean

9 October 2019

Anu Ojha, UK National Space Academy director, on the coolest moons in the solar system, finding alien life and why the best discussions happen with the young

The imperial units error that downed a multi-million-dollar Mars probe

2 October 2019

20 years ago, NASA’s Mars Climate Orbiter dived too deep and was crushed in Mars’s atmosphere. The reason? A mix-up between metric and imperial measurements

Man on the moon? Why we said Apollo 11 was an empty, obsessional quest

19 July 2019

New Scientist was opposed to the Apollo missions from the start, and complained for decades that the money to send people into space was being wasted. Why were we so grumpy and pessimistic about putting a man on the moon?