When I stare up at the night sky, past the pinpricks of stars in our own galaxy, I’m struck by the darkness. That huge, inky blackness separating the great islands of light we call galaxies. It just looks like nothing. An absolute, perfect, crushing emptiness. But is it? Is intergalactic space empty? That’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it? For centuries, we just assumed it was. We called it the “void,” and for good reason. It’s the closest thing to a perfect vacuum we can possibly imagine. And yet, the more we learn, the more we find out that this “void”…
Author: Šinko Jurica
Ever just… stared up into that pitch-black night, seen all those pinpricks of light, and felt… small? Awed? I know I have. You see them, bright and faint, and the question just hits you: where did they come from? Were they always there? Short answer: not a chance. The universe isn’t some static museum. It’s a workshop. An active, churning, dynamic workshop. And the birth of a star? That’s one of its masterpieces. So, let’s take a journey. Not across space, but through time. We’re going to find out exactly how are stars born. This isn’t a story that starts…
We’ve all seen it. The Millennium Falcon jumps to lightspeed, stars stretching into brilliant blue streaks. The Enterprise crew gets a calm “Engage,” and zip—they’re across the galaxy in time for the next episode. Science fiction makes interstellar travel look as easy as a weekend hop. You just… go. Reality, of course, has other plans. When we look up at the night sky, we are staring across an ocean of distance so profound it just plain breaks our intuition. The gulf between the dream of zipping to Alpha Centauri and the cold, hard reality of physics is the domain of…
Let’s be honest. It still feels weird, doesn’t it? For most of our lives, the solar system was this simple, stable, nine-planet family. We all learned the mnemonics in school. (My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas). We memorized the order. Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and… Pluto. He was the little guy at the end. The cold, distant, plucky underdog. And then, boom. In 2006, he was gone. Scientists just… voted him out. One day, nine planets. The next, eight. Pluto’s demotion felt sudden, even cold. To a lot of us, it was a…
When I was a kid, I’d lie in the backyard and just stare up at the night sky. I’d try to count the stars until my eyes blurred, feeling that profound, dizzying sense of scale. Most of us have. We live our lives on a small, rocky planet, orbiting a very average star, tucked away in a spiral arm of our home galaxy, the Milky Way. We know our home is big. But the question that echoes in the human mind, the one that whispers to us from that dark patch of sky between the stars, is always the same:…
Let’s be honest. Have you ever stepped outside on a supposedly “clear” night, looked up, and felt… nothing? Total disappointment. You’ve seen the Hubble pictures. You’ve watched the documentaries. You know, in your head, that the universe is packed with swirling galaxies, glittering star clusters, and entire other worlds. But your sky? It’s just a few lonely pinpricks of light and that weird, hazy peach-colored glow from downtown. It’s a total disconnect. It makes the universe feel fake. The big question, the one that probably brought you here, is how and where to see celestial bodies for real. Not just…
When I was a kid, I used to lie in the backyard, look up at those pinpricks of light, and just… wonder. What are they? How long have they been there? And the biggest question of all: what happens when they go out? That’s a curiosity a lot of us never lose. The night sky, it turns out, is a non-stop drama of cosmic life and death. Understanding how do stars die: stellar evolution isn’t just a dry astronomy lesson. It’s the story of the entire universe. And in a very real way, it’s our own origin story. A star’s…
You know the feeling. It’s a blistering July day, the sun is just relentless, and you’re walking across a parking lot. That black asphalt is radiating heat like a stovetop; you can feel it right through your shoes. Then you hit the white-painted crosswalk, and it’s… not cool, exactly, but it’s noticeably less brutal. Congratulations. You’ve just experienced albedo. It’s this dead-simple concept we all learn as kids: a white t-shirt keeps you cooler than a black one. Light colors reflect sunlight. Dark colors soak it up. Now, take that simple idea and blow it up. Scale it from a…
Step outside on a clear night, far from the city, and just look. What do you see? A perfect, velvet-black canvas of stillness. The stars, whether in the familiar shape of Orion or just a faint dusting across the sky, feel like the very definition of “fixed.” They are our anchors. We’ve navigated by them, told stories about them, and seen them as the one constant in our fleeting human lives. I’m here to tell you that this stillness is a beautiful illusion. It’s a lie told by timescale. Every single one of those pinpricks of light is a sun,…
Look up at a star. It seems fixed, right? A stable point of light. A beacon of stability. But that’s not the whole story. What if I told you many of those stars aren’t perfectly still? What if they’re wobbling? Just a tiny, rhythmic dance. That wobble isn’t a random tremor. It’s a clue. A massive one. It’s the gravitational whisper of an unseen world—a planet—yanking on its parent star. This is the central idea behind finding exoplanets with radial velocity. It’s a technique so sensitive it can spot worlds hundreds of light-years away just by measuring that star’s wobble.…