Space & the universe

In the early 1900s, Henrietta Leavitt cataloged thousands of pulsing stars on glass photographic plates for 30 cents an hour, and found a pattern that let astronomers finally measure the distance to other galaxies. Her overlooked law became the yardstick Hubble used to prove the universe was expanding. This is the story of the discovery that gave the cosmos its scale.

In 1977, a team led by Carl Sagan had six weeks to decide what all of humanity should say to the stars, etched onto a gold-plated disc bolted to Voyager. This is the story of the impossible choices behind those sounds and images, and why one greeting was left off at the last minute. It's a meditation on how you introduce a species to strangers you'll never meet.

In the 1930s, astronomer Fritz Zwicky measured galaxies moving too fast to hold together and concluded most of the universe was invisible. His idea was ignored for forty years until Vera Rubin's spinning galaxies forced everyone to take dark matter seriously. This is the story of a correct idea that arrived decades too early.

In 1977 an Ohio radio telescope caught a 72-second burst so strong that astronomer Jerry Ehman circled it on a printout and scrawled 'Wow!' in the margin. This is the story of that single sheet of paper, the decades of failed attempts to hear it again, and why one unrepeatable signal still haunts the search for life.

How Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin’s 1925 discovery of what stars are made of was dismissed as impossible by the elite.

Companies and nations are preparing to extract water and metals from the Moon and asteroids, but the treaties governing space were written for a different era. Examine the unresolved law of who can claim and profit from what's out there.

Tens of thousands of satellites are now reshaping global internet access, military communications, and the night sky. Explore the technology, the astronomy it disrupts, and the geopolitics of who controls the orbits closest to Earth.