CosmosLens Editors

Editorial team

CosmosLens Editors is the shared byline of our editorial team. Stories under this name are prepared in-house from published research, mission data and agency records. AI tools assist with research and drafting, and every story is checked against its sources before it is published.

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Cosmology
Planetary science
Space exploration
Physics
Astrobiology
History of science

Stories by CosmosLens Editors

The black disc of the Moon covering the Sun during a total solar eclipse, ringed by the pale white glow of the corona.

PlanetsExplainer

The eclipses India will see through 2035, city by city

India’s next total lunar eclipse falls on New Year’s Eve 2028. Its next total solar eclipse arrives in 2034, close to sunset, and only the far north gets it.

CosmosLens EditorsNovember 11, 20265 min read

An Indian PSLV rocket lifting off at night from the First Launch Pad at Sriharikota, with towers on either side and clouds of orange-lit exhaust.

ExplorationAnalysis

Why India is building a spaceport 640 kilometers south of its first

Sriharikota is well placed for reaching geostationary orbit. For polar orbits, a neighbor is in the way. The arithmetic shows why a small rocket needs a different pad.

CosmosLens EditorsNovember 10, 20265 min read

A thin meteor streak crosses a star-filled sky above the dark silhouettes of conifer trees.

PlanetsExplainer

The Leonids peak just before dawn on 18 November, and India has a dark sky for it

The half Moon sets around midnight, the radiant climbs high, and the predicted peak lands in the last dark hour before dawn. Here is when to look from your city, and an honest estimate of what you will see.

CosmosLens EditorsNovember 10, 20267 min read1 view

Illustrated chart of the eastern to southern sky from Delhi at 6 am on 16 November 2026. Venus is about 20 degrees up in the east, Mercury lower at 8 degrees, and Jupiter and Mars sit side by side about 73 degrees up in the south-east near the star Regulus.

PlanetsExplainer

Which planets you can see from India this winter, and when to look

This evening only Saturn is up. The real gathering is before sunrise, when Venus, Jupiter, Mars and Mercury share the sky. By February, Jupiter and Mars move into the evening at their brightest of the season.

CosmosLens EditorsNovember 10, 20265 min read

A large orange full moon rising beside the lit dome of the United States Capitol, with the city skyline in the foreground at dusk.

PlanetsExplainer

The full moon of 24 November is big. The one on Christmas Eve is bigger

November’s full moon rises around sunset across India on Kartik Purnima. By one common definition it is a supermoon and by another it just misses. We measured both, and the December full moon that beats it.

CosmosLens EditorsNovember 10, 20266 min read

The orange disc of the Sun against a black sky with a large dark bite taken out of its upper part by the Moon, and a few small sunspots visible.

PlanetsExplainer

The solar eclipse of 2 August 2027 from India: a late-afternoon partial eclipse, city by city

One of the century’s longest total eclipses crosses Egypt that afternoon. India sees only a partial eclipse, deepest at the southern tip and missing entirely in the far north-east. We calculated what each city gets.

CosmosLens EditorsNovember 10, 20266 min read

Two brilliant stars, one slightly larger than the other, with long crossed diffraction spikes against a black background.

CosmosExplainer

One light year is about 9.46 lakh crore kilometres. Here is how far that really is

A light year is a distance, not a time. We worked out how long it would take to travel one by train, by plane and by spacecraft, and how far India’s own missions are in light-time.

CosmosLens EditorsNovember 10, 20264 min read

An Indian Air Force Chinook helicopter against a clear blue sky, carrying a white and orange cone-shaped Gaganyaan test capsule on a long cable beneath it.

ExplorationExplainer

Gaganyaan in November 2026: what has flown, what has not, and when India’s astronauts might launch

No launch date has been announced yet. Here is where India’s human spaceflight programme stands, who the astronauts are, what the first flights will do, and why the date keeps moving.

CosmosLens EditorsNovember 10, 20265 min read

A deep field crowded with thousands of galaxies of many shapes and colours against black space, some stretched into arcs, with a few bright foreground stars showing six-pointed spikes.

CosmosExplainer

How old is the universe? 13.8 billion years, and three ways we know

The number comes from running the expansion of space backwards. We did that calculation ourselves, then checked it against the oldest stars, a clock that no expansion measurement can touch.

CosmosLens EditorsNovember 10, 20265 min read

Night view from orbit of the bright web of city lights around New Delhi, with the thin glowing layer of Earth’s atmosphere along the horizon and stars in the black sky above.

ExplorationExplainer

What India looks like from the space station, and when you can see it from India

From the International Space Station, Kashmir and Sri Lanka are on the same horizon. We worked out how much of India fits in one look, what the eye can pick out from orbit, and when the station is visible from your city.

CosmosLens EditorsNovember 10, 20265 min read

ISRO’s LVM3 rocket lifting off between two tall lightning towers, flame and a billowing white cloud of exhaust beneath it, under a partly cloudy sky.

ExplorationExplainer

What Chandrayaan-3 found at the Moon’s south pole

Vikram and Pragyan worked for less than two weeks in 2023. The papers have been arriving since. Here is what each instrument measured, what it means, and how sure scientists are, plus our own check on one surprising number.

CosmosLens EditorsNovember 10, 20266 min read

Full disc of Earth seen from deep space, with India, the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal near the centre, the Himalayas and Tibetan plateau to the north, Africa to the left and swirls of white cloud over the Indian Ocean.

PhysicsExplainer

How fast is Earth spinning where you live in India?

Everyone in India is moving at well over 1,000 km/h without feeling a thing. We calculated the speed for each city, then added Earth’s orbit, the Sun’s path around the galaxy, and what all that does to your weight.

CosmosLens EditorsNovember 10, 20264 min read

A long exposure of Geminid meteors streaking across the Milky Way above the white dome of a telescope on a dark hilltop.

PlanetsExplainer

In India, the Geminids peak at dinner time

Most guides will send you out on the night of 13 December. For observers in India, the numbers point to the following evening, once the Moon has set.

CosmosLens EditorsNovember 8, 20266 min read

The gold-plated cover of the Voyager Golden Record, engraved with diagrams showing how to play it and a map locating the Sun among nearby pulsars.

ExplorationFeature

One light-day from home

On 18 November 2026, a radio signal from Earth needs a full day to reach Voyager 1. The arithmetic of that distance explains why the mission still works, and why it cannot work for much longer.

CosmosLens EditorsNovember 8, 20265 min read8 views

Hubble Space Telescope image of the spiral galaxy NGC 5584, its arms dotted with blue star-forming regions.

CosmosAnalysis

The universe is expanding at two different speeds

Measure the expansion rate from the early universe and you get one number. Measure it from nearby galaxies and you get another. A decade of better data has made the gap harder to explain away.

CosmosLens EditorsNovember 8, 20265 min read

A small glowing blue cloud of strontium atoms at the center of a vacuum chamber, framed by dark laboratory hardware.

PhysicsFeature

Time is what clocks do

The best optical clocks would drift by less than a second over the age of the universe. They can see gravity change the flow of time across a millimeter, and the second itself is due to be redefined around them.

CosmosLens EditorsNovember 8, 20264 min read

Black-and-white photograph of women seated at desks with ledgers and magnifiers in an office at Harvard College Observatory.

IdeasProfile

Henrietta Leavitt’s ruler

Working for thirty cents an hour on glass plates of the southern sky, Henrietta Swan Leavitt found the relationship that let astronomers measure the universe. The paper announcing it went out under her director’s signature.

CosmosLens EditorsNovember 8, 20264 min read3 views

Europa’s pale, cream-colored surface crossed by reddish-brown cracks and ridges, against a black background.

PlanetsFeature

An ocean under the ice, and a spacecraft on its way

Jupiter’s moon Europa probably holds about twice as much liquid water as all of Earth’s oceans. Juno has now measured the ice above it, and Europa Clipper arrives in 2030 to ask whether that ocean could support life.

CosmosLens EditorsNovember 8, 20264 min read1 view

NASA’s Perseverance rover on reddish Martian bedrock beside the arrowhead-shaped rock called Cheyava Falls, with a rocky hill behind under a hazy sky.

LifeAnalysis

The leopard spots of Cheyava Falls

A rock in an ancient Martian river valley carries chemical patterns that, on Earth, are usually made by microbes. NASA calls it a potential biosignature. The sample that could settle it may never come home.

CosmosLens EditorsNovember 8, 20264 min read

Wide-field infrared image from the James Webb Space Telescope showing a small, ringed Uranus at the center, surrounded by stars and distant galaxies.

ExplorationAnalysis

The case for going back to Uranus

One spacecraft has visited the seventh planet, for a few hours in 1986. Forty years on, even its basic facts are being revised, and the calendar of Uranus’s long seasons is making the case for a return.

CosmosLens EditorsNovember 8, 20264 min read

Oval all-sky map of the cosmic microwave background, mottled with blue and orange-red spots representing tiny temperature differences.

CosmosExplainer

The oldest light remembers everything

The cosmic microwave background was released when the universe was 380,000 years old. Its faint ripples encode the universe’s age, contents and shape. Here is how to read them.

CosmosLens EditorsNovember 8, 20264 min read

Illustration of a blue ocean-covered planet with a thick hazy atmosphere, lit from one side by a distant red star.

PlanetsAnalysis

How to read the sky of a world you will never see

Astronomers can now measure the gases around a planet 124 light-years away. The rise and fall of the claims about K2-18b show what that technique can do, and how easily it can be over-read.

CosmosLens EditorsNovember 8, 20264 min read

A large circular superconducting magnet ring, about fifteen meters across, inside an experimental hall at Fermilab.

PhysicsAnalysis

The muon anomaly that dissolved

For twenty years, a tiny wobble in the muon’s magnetism looked like a crack in the Standard Model. The final measurement is in, and the crack seems to have closed. The real puzzle turned out to be in the theory.

CosmosLens EditorsNovember 8, 20264 min read

Long-exposure photograph of observatory domes on a mountaintop beneath concentric star trails.

CosmosAnalysis

Is dark energy running out of steam?

The largest three-dimensional map of the universe hints that the force driving cosmic acceleration may be weakening. A 2026 reanalysis has made that evidence weaker, and more interesting.

CosmosLens EditorsNovember 8, 20264 min read

Scanning electron micrograph of a tardigrade, a plump segmented animal with stubby clawed legs, in gray tones.

LifeExplainer

What tardigrades know about surviving space

Half a millimeter long and found almost everywhere, tardigrades can survive drying, freezing, radiation and even the vacuum of space. They are not indestructible. Their tricks are more interesting than that.

CosmosLens EditorsNovember 8, 20264 min read

Earth, half in shadow, rising above the gray, cratered horizon of the Moon against black space.

ExplorationEssay

Earthrise, and every picture of home since

A photograph taken on Christmas Eve 1968 changed how people saw the planet, and it was turned on its side before anyone saw it. What the most famous pictures of Earth show, and what we did to them.

CosmosLens EditorsNovember 8, 20264 min read

The night side of Earth seen from space, with the cities of North America glowing as clusters of orange light against the dark globe.

IdeasEssay

The night sky is disappearing, about ten percent a year

Light pollution is brightening the sky faster than satellite data suggested, and a growing fleet of satellites adds streaks of its own. What we lose when we cannot see the stars is not only astronomy.

CosmosLens EditorsNovember 8, 20264 min read

Venus seen as a full disk, its thick atmosphere showing faint blue-white swirling cloud bands.

PlanetsExplainer

Venus, the planet that went wrong

Earth’s nearest neighbor absorbs less sunlight than Earth does, yet its surface is hot enough to melt lead. Understanding how that happened is one of the most practical questions in planetary science.

CosmosLens EditorsNovember 8, 20264 min read

A hand-drawn diagram of labeled particle tracks beside the black-and-white bubble chamber photograph it interprets, full of thin white trails.

PhysicsFeature

When physics learned to photograph the invisible

For three decades, particle physics ran on photographs: millions of images of bubble trails in superheated liquid, measured by hand. The bubble chamber shaped what physicists found, and who did the finding.

CosmosLens EditorsNovember 8, 20264 min read