radio interference

In July 1969, as Apollo 11 flew toward the Moon, astronauts noticed something unusual: brief flashes of light that appeared even with their eyes closed. At first, this was attributed to fatigue, but the flashes recurred in different crews. Gradually, it became clear: cosmic rays were to blame — tiny particles hurtling through space at tremendous speeds.

A black hole merger is not a silent impact. The newborn hole quivers and decays, emitting gravitational waves — ripples in space itself. This signal is called the 'ringdown,' and it resembles the fading chime of a bell: it has a fundamental tone and several overtones.

In 1960, the Tatel radio telescope spent weeks listening to emptiness around Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani. Project Ozma was searching for technosignatures — traces of another mind at work.

A figure skater glides across the ice, gradually moving toward the center. Their trajectory isn't a perfect spiral: sometimes they catch the rhythm of the music and add an extra turn, slightly changing their speed. That's roughly how a small black hole behaves when it falls into a supermassive one.

Gravitational wave detectors work like sensitive microphones, picking up the trembling of space from distant cosmic catastrophes. When two black holes merge into one, the newborn object rings like a bell, and that ringing is a unique 'voice' of gravity.

The light from a distant star is never steady. It shimmers like heat over hot asphalt. When astronomers pointed JWST at the star TOI 700, they saw this shimmer especially clearly: every 16 minutes, the brightness changed by a tiny fraction, just 46 parts per million.For comparison: if you placed a light bulb a kilometer away, this change would be…

The night sky is no longer as quiet as it used to be. Thousands of satellites are whizzing overhead, and each one can accidentally emit radio waves, interfering with astronomers trying to listen to distant galaxies. To make sense of this noise, scientists pointed the 21CMA radio telescope in China at Starlink satellite passes.

A radio telescope picks up a signal from the Crab Nebula, and instead of a smooth line, the screen shows bright and dark bands, like on a zebra's hide. This is the emission from the pulsar, a rapidly spinning neutron star left over from a supernova explosion.

Neutrinos are ghost particles: predicted by the Standard Model, they barely interact with matter. Catching them is like trying to hear a whisper in the roar of a waterfall.

Two giant black holes spiral together and collide — a ripple of spacetime spreads across the Universe. Detectors of gravitational waves catch this ripple. But the signal may hide more than just mass and distance: if the laws of physics differ ever so slightly in different directions, the wave will be distorted.

The galaxy is like a city at night: most windows shine steadily, but sometimes a skyscraper lights up all its lights and then goes dark. Just like that, according to a new hypothesis about planets around alien stars (exoplanet), we might first notice another civilization — by a short but blinding flash that could mark its demise.

The Moon is not just a satellite; it is a potential gravitational bell. When massive bodies collide, spacetime shudders, and that shudder, gravitational waves, makes everything in their path vibrate.

The cosmic electron spectrum is like fingerprints at a crime scene. Particles arriving from the depths of the Galaxy carry in their energies the traces of those that produced them. For a long time, the picture was blurred: instruments with wide energy bins, like out-of-focus photographs, did not reveal details.