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This is Defector, a new sports blog and media company. We made this place together, we own it together, we run it together. Without access, without favor, without discretion, and without interference.

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Defector

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Barry Petchesky

UNITED KINGDOM - MAY 30: Saturn, by Jamie Cooper. This image showing Saturn with six of it's moons was taken on 26th January 2006 at 22:11 hrs UT using a webcam attached to a 14 inch Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope. The moons are from left to right: Titan, Mimas,Tethys, Rhea, Enceladus and Dione. (Photo by Jamie Cooper/SSPL/Getty Images)

Saturn, by Jamie Cooper.

Why Is This So Good?

I Implore You To Look At Saturn Through A Telescope

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Albert Burneko

Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket carrying astronauts Aisha Bowe, Amanda Nguyễn, Kerianne Flynn, Gayle King, Katy Perry, and Lauren Sánchez, lifts off from Launch Site One north of Van Horn, Texas on April 14, 2025.

blue origin

Science

At What Point Has One Actually “Been To” Space?

<div>Paola Rosa-Aquino is a freelance journalist covering science, space and the environment. Born and raised in Puerto Rico, she now lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her canine co-worker Cece.</div>
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Paola Rosa-Aquino

Flames are seen after Starship's Super Heavy Booster splashed down for a water landing off the coast of, Texas, on its sixth flight test on November 19, 2024. SpaceX aborted an attempt to catch the first stage booster of its Starship megarocket in the "chopstick" arms of its launch tower, opting instead for an ocean splashdown, a live feed showed November 19. The hitch came as President-elect Donald Trump joined SpaceX chief Elon Musk at the company's Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas to watch the test flight, the latest sign of the budding bromance between the two billionaires. (Photo by CHANDAN KHANNA / AFP) (Photo by CHANDAN KHANNA/AFP via Getty Images)

US-SPACE-AEROSPACE-SPACEX-STARSHIP

We’re Littering The Earth With Space Trash

A giant of a moon appears before a giant of a planet undergoing seasonal changes in this natural color view of Titan and Saturn from NASA's Cassini spacecraft. (Photo by: Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

A giant of a moon appears before a giant of a planet undergoing seasonal changes in this natural color view of Titan and Saturn from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft.

Saturn Has 274 Moons Now; Jupiter Is Crying Itself To Sleep; It Literally Cannot Believe It

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Patrick Redford

NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA - FEBRUARY 03: Jalen Hurts #1 of the Philadelphia Eagles and Patrick Mahomes #15 of the Kansas City Chiefs chat on stage during Super Bowl LIX Opening Night at Caesars Superdome on February 03, 2025 in New Orleans, Louisiana. (Photo by Michael Owens/Getty Images)

Super Bowl LIX Opening Night

This Is So Stupid

What Time Does “What Time Does The Super Bowl Start?” Start?

ROBLEDO DE CHAVELA, MADRID, SPAIN - 2020/08/19: A meteor crossing the night sky over the Milky way and a large antenna of the Madrid Deep Space Communications Complex of NASA and JPL, used for for tracking vehicles and spacecraft as well as for radioastronomy research. (Photo by Marcos del Mazo/LightRocket via Getty Images)

A meteor crossing the night sky over the Milky way and a

What To Know About The Newest Asteroid That Probably Won’t Obliterate You

Europa

Let’s Go See What’s Swimming Around On Europa

A wide view of the desolate Martian landscape, captured by the Perseverance rover.

Neither Elon Musk Nor Anybody Else Will Ever Colonize Mars

In this illustration, a Boeing CST-100 Starliner spacecraft is shown in low-Earth orbit. NASA is partnering with Boeing and SpaceX to build a new generation of human-rated spacecraft capable of taking astronauts to the International Space Station and expanding research opportunities in orbit. Boeing's upcoming Orbital Flight Test is part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Transportation Capability contract with the goal of returning human spaceflight launch capabilities to the United States.

Boeing CST-100 Starliner Banner

No Need To Worry About Eerie, Mysterious “Pulsing” Noise Coming From Janky Boeing Starliner, NASA Insists

The United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket with Boeing's CST-100 Starliner spacecraft launches from Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on June 5, 2024. Boeing launched its very first astronauts bound for the International Space Station aboard a Starliner capsule, which joins a select club of spacecraft to carry humans beyond Earth.

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Boeing Starliner Astronauts Electively Spending Five More Months In Space To Hitch Ride In Different Vehicle Due To Preference For Not Dying

The United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket with Boeing's CST-100 Starliner spacecraft appears as a blazing meteor with a long trail of vapor as it launches from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on June 5, 2024.

Boeing Starliner

Do Not Say The Boeing Starliner Astronauts Are Stranded In Space, Which They Cannot Presently Return From Due To Problems With Their Spacecraft

NASA Must Put Me On The Simulated Mars Mission, To Test The Astronauts’ Patience

The mated Russian-built Zarya (left) and U.S.-built Unity modules are backdropped against the blackness of space over Earth's horizon shortly after leaving Endeavour's cargo bay December 13, 1998. After being released from the shuttle Endeavour, the international space station was orbiting the Earth on its own today -- ``a bright new star'''' not to be visited again until May. (photo by NASA)

Space Station orbiting earth following release

What If We’re Stuck Down Here?

Earthrise - Apollo 8, December 24, 1968. This view of the rising Earth greeted the Apollo 8 astronauts as they came from behind the Moon after the fourth nearside orbit. The photo, by&#xa0;astronaut&#xa0;William Anders, is displayed here in its original orientation, though it is more commonly viewed with the lunar surface at the bottom of the photo. Earth is about five degrees left of the horizon in the photo. The unnamed surface features on the left are near the eastern limb of the Moon as viewed from Earth. The lunar horizon is approximately 780 kilometers from the spacecraft. Height of the photographed area at the lunar horizon is about 175 kilometers.

Earthrise – Apollo 8

Bill Anders First Saw The Earth

The NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope has captured the sharpest infrared images to date of one of the most distinctive objects in our skies, the Horsehead Nebula. These observations show a part of the iconic nebula in a whole new light, capturing its complexity with unprecedented spatial resolution. Webb’s new images show part of the sky in the constellation Orion (The Hunter), in the western side of the Orion B molecular cloud. Rising from turbulent waves of dust and gas is the Horsehead Nebula, otherwise known as Barnard 33, which resides roughly 1300 light-years away.  The nebula formed from a collapsing interstellar cloud of material, and glows because it is illuminated by a nearby hot star. The gas clouds surrounding the Horsehead have already dissipated, but the jutting pillar is made of thick clumps of material that is harder to erode. Astronomers estimate that the Horsehead has about five million years left before it too disintegrates. Webb’s new view focuses on the illuminated edge of the top of the nebula’s distinctive dust and gas structure. The Horsehead Nebula is a well-known photon-dominated region, or PDR. In such a region ultraviolet light from young, massive stars creates a mostly neutral, warm area of gas and dust between the fully ionised gas surrounding the massive stars and the clouds in which they are born. This ultraviolet radiation strongly influences the gas chemistry of these regions and acts as the most important source of heat.  These regions occur where interstellar gas is dense enough to remain neutral, but not dense enough to prevent the penetration of far-ultraviolet light from massive stars. The light emitted from such PDRs provides a unique tool to study the physical and chemical processes that drive the evolution of interstellar matter in our galaxy, and throughout the Universe from the early era of vigorous star formation to the present day. Owing to its proximity and its nearly edge-on geometry, the Horsehead Nebula is an ideal target for astronomers to study the physical structures of PDRs and the evolution of the chemical characteristics of the gas and dust within their respective environments, and the transition regions between them. It is considered one of the best objects in the sky to study how radiation interacts with interstellar matter. This image was captured with Webb’s NIRCam (Near-InfraRed Camera) instrument. [Image description: At the bottom of the image a small portion of the Horsehead Nebula is seen close-in, as a curved wall of thick, smoky gas and dust. Above the nebula various distant stars and galaxies can be seen up to the top of the image. One star is very bright and large, with six long diffraction spikes that cross the image. The background fades from a dark red colour above the nebula to black.]

Horsehead Nebula (NIRCam image)

The Closer We Look The Smaller We Get

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Ray Ratto

A first-quarter moon is seen through a telescope from L'Aquila, Italy, on February 16th, 2024. (Photo by Lorenzo Di Cola/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Moon And Pleiades Conjunction

What Time Will Football Start On The Moon?

&lt;&gt; on August 21, 2017 in Casper, Wyoming.

Solar Eclipse Visible Across Swath Of U.S.

Solar Eclipses: No Longer Scary, Still Astonishingly Cool


<p>charismatic megafauna (they/them)</p>


Typing

Sabrina Imbler

a silhouette of a semi truck in front of a starry sky

Vibrations From “Interstellar Meteor” Actually From Local Truck; Or, Fact-Checking The Celebrity Scientist

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I Think I Found The Problem Here: The Rocket Blew Up

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Landing On The Moon Isn’t Getting Any Easier

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I Bonked My Head On The Moon

The Little Mars Helicopter That Could

VALLES MARINERIS, MARS - Mars' own Grand Canyon, Valles Marineris, is shown on the surface of the planet in this composite image made aboard NASA's Mars Odyssey spacecraft. The image was taken from a video featuring high-resolution images from Arizona State University's Thermal Emission Imaging System multi-band camera on board the spacecraft. The mosaic was then colored to approximate how Mars would look to the human eye. Valles Marineris is 10 times longer, five times deeper and 20 times wider than Earth's Grand Canyon. (Photo by NASA/Arizona State University via Getty Images)

Valles Marineris Cuts Through Mars Surface

There’s So Much Ice On Mars, You Guys

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Neptune’s A Pale Blue Fraud!

The graceful winding arms of the grand-design spiral galaxy M51 stretch across this image from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope. Unlike the menagerie of weird and wonderful spiral galaxies with ragged or disrupted spiral arms, grand-design spiral galaxies boast prominent, well-developed spiral arms like the ones showcased in this image. This galactic portrait was captured by Webb’s Mid-InfraRed Instrument (MIRI). In this image the reprocessed stellar light by dust grains and molecules in the medium of the galaxy illuminate a dramatic filamentary medium. Empty cavities and bright filaments alternate and give the impression of ripples propagating from the spiral arms. The yellow compact regions indicate the newly formed star clusters in the galaxy. M51 — also known as NGC 5194 — lies about 27 million light-years away from Earth in the constellation Canes Venatici, and is trapped in a tumultuous relationship with its near neighbour, the dwarf galaxy NGC 5195. The interaction between these two galaxies has made these galactic neighbours one of the better-studied galaxy pairs in the night sky. The gravitational influence of M51’s smaller companion is thought to be partially responsible for the stately nature of the galaxy’s prominent and distinct spiral arms. If you would like to learn more about this squabbling pair of galactic neighbours, you can explore earlier observations of M51 by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope here.  This Webb observation of M51 is one of a series of observations collectively titled Feedback in Emerging extrAgalactic Star clusTers, or FEAST. The FEAST observations were designed to shed light on the interplay between stellar feedback and star formation in environments outside of our own galaxy, the Milky Way. Stellar feedback is the term used to describe the outpouring of energy from stars into the environments which form them, and is a crucial process in determining the rates at which stars form. Understanding stellar feedback is vital to building accurate universal models of star formation. The aim of the FEAST observations is to discover and study stellar nurseries in galaxies beyond our own Milky Way. Before Webb became operative, other observatories such as the Atacama Large Millimetre Array in the Chilean desert and Hubble have given us a glimpse of star formation either at the onset (tracing the dense gas and dust clouds where stars will form) or after the stars have destroyed with their energy their natal gas and dust clouds. Webb is opening a new window into the early stages of star formation and stellar light, as well as the energy reprocessing of gas and dust. Scientists are seeing star clusters emerging from their natal cloud in galaxies beyond our local group for the first time. They will also be able to measure how long it takes for these stars to pollute with newly formed metals and to clean out the gas (these time scales are different from galaxy to galaxy). By studying these processes, we will better understand how the star formation cycle and metal enrichment are regulated within galaxies as well as what are the time scales for planets and brown dwarfs to form. Once dust and gas is removed from the newly formed stars, there is no material left to form planets. [Image Description: A large spiral galaxy takes up the entirety of the image. The core is mostly bright white, but there are also swirling, detailed structures that resemble water circling a drain. There is white and pale blue light that emanates from stars and dust at the core’s centre, but it is tightly limited to the core. The detailed rings feature bands of deep orange and cloudy grey, which are interspersed by darker empty regions throughout.]

M51 (MIRI image)

Fall Into The Whirlpool Galaxy

Space