These 19th-century astronomical drawings show the beauty of cosmos

Étienne Léopold Trouvelot We live in a golden age of astrophotography, with a feast of jaw-dropping images from the farthest reaches of space crossing our news feeds on a daily basis. But sometimes it’s good to revisit the imagery of our pre-photographic past—in this case, the work of 19th-century illustrator Étienne Léopold Trouvelot. The Frenchman, […]

Data mining astronomical records fails to falsify Einstein

Enlarge / The orbits of stars and gas around the Milky Way’s black hole. (credit: M. Schartmann and L. Calcada/ European Southern Observatory and Max-Planck-Institut fur Extraterrestrische Physik.) Testing general relativity is a fraught business. The theory has proven to be so robust that anyone who thinks it’s wrong gets slapped around by reality in […]