tag

#time

2 reading cards on “time”, in chronological order. Part of the full archive.

  1. Artist's concept showing a millisecond pulsar at centre with its twisted blue magnetic field lines, and three rocky planets in orbit around it, with auroral light illustrated on the foreground planet's night side.
    2026-05-15

    Binary Pulsars

    Clocks in motion, watched by clocks — and sometimes, mid-experiment, the clock turns away.

    A pulsar locked in orbit with another compact body becomes a moving timepiece whose ticks can be tracked to nanoseconds. That precision is what makes binary pulsars the most demanding laboratory we have for gravity — and what occasionally reveals that one of them has stopped pointing at us.
  2. Webb's First Deep Field — galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 imaged by the James Webb Space Telescope, with thousands of galaxies including faint, gravitationally lensed objects from the early universe
    2026-05-08

    Fossil Light

    Astronomy is the only science that cannot observe the present.

    Every photon that reaches a telescope is news from a moment that has already ended. The further the source, the older the news — and the more the universe in front of us is no longer there.