The problem with trying to take a picture of a black hole is that it consumes everything, even the light around it. Now, a team of scientists is working to make the first image of a black hole by using telescopes around the world to look at its shadowy edge.
outer space
Posted inArt
The Man Who Ran Away With the Moon
In Russia in 2003, a man fell in love with the moon. Or that’s the story artist Leonid Tishkov presents in his Private Moon series, where he journeys around the Earth with his cosmic companion: a radiant, six-foot-tall crescent moon.
Posted inArt
Set Your Eyes on a Cosmic Collision with the Best Space Photos of the Year
Last week, an exhibition opened with the top photographs from the Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2013 competition at the Royal Observatory Greenwich’s Astronomy Centre in London.
Posted inArt
Voyager Has Left the Solar System, Taking With it the Sounds of Space
As Voyager becomes the first human-made object to enter interstellar space, it also carries the first human-made mixtape destined for such depths of the universe.
Posted inArt
The Sharpest Photographs Ever Taken of the Night Sky
A new technology is allowing astronomers to take sharper than ever photographs of the night sky, revealing secrets of the solar system and the universe beyond.
Posted inOpinion
Shoot for the Stars: First GIF Shared in Space
To launch a project that will crowdsource digital media projected into space, it makes sense to start with a GIF, the most beloved manifestation of our current internet noise. Today the first GIF to ever be sent into space started a journey to a distant solar system — which it will reach in 2031.
Posted inNews
NASA Beams the Mona Lisa into Space
What do art mavens and NASA nerds have in common? Maybe not much. But late last month, the two were artfully brought together when the Mona Lisa was projected into outer space on laser pulses.
Posted inArt
What’s the Point of Sending Pictures into Space?
For his latest project, The Last Pictures, Trevor Paglen is doing something unconventional: he’s sending photographs into space. Paglen, an artist and writer with a PhD in geography, worked with researchers and assistants at public art organization Creative Time to select a group of 100 photographs meant to reflect the reign of humans on earth, “a visual record of our contemporary historical moment,” according to the project’s website; in the process, he conducted interviews with scientists, philosophers, artists, and historians about the idea. He then enlisted material scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to help him etch the pictures into an archival, gold-plated disc, and launched the photo set into space aboard a communications satellite. The pictures will live on there for billions of years — long past the time when humans inhabit the earth, probably until the end of the earth itself.