Astronomy, spaceflight and the exploration of the universe.
Voyager 1 is the most distant human-made object from Earth. The spacecraft was launched on September 5, 1977, from Cape Canaveral on a Titan IIIE-Centaur rocket. It is one of two spacecraft in the Voyager program, and Voyager 2 launched before Voyager 1. The mission was designed to explore the outer planets, taking advantage of a rare alignment known as the Grand Tour that allowed a spacecraft to visit them all.
Sputnik 1 was the first artificial satellite, launched by the Soviet Union on October 4, 1957. Its successful orbit marked the beginning of the Space Age and initiated a new chapter in human history. The satellite was a polished metal sphere, 58 cm in diameter, and weighed 83.6 kg. It was launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome by an R-7 ICBM.
Neil Alden Armstrong was an American astronaut, born on August 5, 1930, in Wapakoneta, Ohio. He died on August 25, 2012, in Cincinnati, Ohio. Armstrong is best known as the first person to set foot on the Moon, an achievement that secured his place in history. His life began in the small Ohio town of Wapakoneta, where he grew up and first developed an interest in aviation.
The Kuiper Belt is a doughnut-shaped region of icy bodies extending far beyond the orbit of Neptune. It is one of the largest structures in the Solar System, a vast expanse that occupies the outer reaches of the Sun's domain and has become a central focus of modern planetary science. The belt is home to Pluto and most of the known dwarf planets, as well as millions of other icy objects. It contains Pluto, most known dwarf planets, and a vast population of smaller bodies that collectively represent a significant component of the Solar System's architecture.
Exoplanets are planets that orbit stars other than the Sun, and their study has become one of the most active fields of modern astronomy. The first extrasolar planets were discovered in 1992 by radio astronomers Aleksander Wolszczan and Dale Frail, who found two planets orbiting the pulsar PSR B1257+12. This detection established that planetary systems exist beyond our solar system, although the host was a pulsar rather than a star like the Sun. The discovery was made using pulsar timing, a technique that detects planets by observing variations in the arrival times of pulses from a pulsar.
Carl Sagan was born on November 9, 1934, in Brooklyn, New York. This origin in one of the most populous and culturally dense urban environments of the United States preceded a career that would eventually extend to the study of distant worlds and the origins of life itself. His upbringing in Brooklyn placed him within a milieu that valued public education and intellectual ambition, though the documentary record preserved in institutional biographies focuses primarily on the formal milestones of his training rather than the private circumstances of his childhood. What is unambiguously establis…
The Event Horizon Telescope is a global very-long-baseline interferometry array that operates at a wavelength of 1.3 mm. By linking radio dishes across the planet, it forms a virtual Earth-sized telescope capable of resolving the innermost regions of supermassive black holes. This capability allowed the collaboration to produce the first image of a black hole in 2019 and, subsequently, the first image of the black hole at the center of the Milky Way. The EHT observes at a frequency of 230 GHz, corresponding to a wavelength of 1.3 mm.