Empty, intergalactic space is just 2.725 K: not even three degrees above absolute zero. But the Boomerang Nebula is even colder.
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In the 20th century, many options abounded as to our cosmic origins. Today, only the Big Bang survives, thanks to this critical evidence.
Researchers find a way to distort laser light to survive a trip through disordered obstacles.
A new study proposes that Hawking radiation could be used to find dark matter in places like primordial black holes.
How does philosophy try to balance having free will with living in a deterministic universe?
The strangest thing about trying to predict the future is that our only clues lie in the past.
Even physicists sometimes fall for these. For centuries, the laws of physics seemed completely deterministic. If you knew where every particle was, how fast it was moving, and what the forces […]
If the multiverse is real, where does all the energy for it come from? One of the biggest scientific puzzles, even given our knowledge of the Big Bang, is to understand […]
Why I was prepared to hate The Structure of Scientific Revolutions but ended up loving it.
We’re used to scientists telling us about the math and physics behind astronomical events. But what does studying space make us feel?
The Universe has asymmetries, but that’s a good thing. Imperfections are essential for the existence of stars and even life itself.
There’s a speed limit to the Universe: the speed of light in a vacuum. Want to beat the speed of light? Try going through a medium!
Since its observation discovery in the 1990s, dark energy has been one of science’s biggest mysteries. Could black holes be the cause?
Controversial physics theory says reality around us behaves like a computer neural network.
To find the optimal route between many different locations, we need the power of quantum computers.
Information may not seem like something physical, yet it has become a central concern for physicists. A wonderful new book explores the importance of the “dataome” for the physical, biological, and human worlds.
The more horror we consume, the harder it becomes to find a good scare. These genuinely unsettling movies should get you in the mood for Halloween.
75 years after Erwin Schrödinger’s prescient description of something like DNA, we still don’t know the “laws of life.”
In our Universe, a left hand reflected in a mirror or pond appears to be a right hand. While most of the laws of nature are symmetric under reflections, obeying […]
There’s an extra source of massive “stuff” in our Universe beyond what gravitation and normal matter can explain. Could light be the answer?
It’s perhaps the most famous thought experiment in all of physics, but is full of popular myths and misconceptions. One of the most bizarre ideas about the quantum Universe is […]
Researchers devise groundbreaking new methods to create and duplicate single-atom transistors for quantum computers.
There are so many problems, all across planet Earth, that harm and threaten humanity. Why invest in researching the Universe?
If dark energy gets stronger with time, our fate could be an utter catastrophe. When it comes to the entire Universe, one of the biggest existential questions we’re capable of […]
Three of our dimensions are spatial and one is temporal, but could there be more? From any point in space, you are free to move in any direction you choose. No […]
As the first Friedmann equation celebrates its 99th anniversary, it remains the one equation to describe our entire universe.
Nuclear fusion has long been seen as the future of energy. As the NIF now passes the breakeven point, how close are we to our ultimate goal?
If we waited long enough, would even protons themselves decay? There are certain things in the Universe that, if you leave them alone for long enough, they’ll eventually decay away. […]
Is the Universe the same everywhere? Or are there truly ‘special places’ around? For practically all of human history, one assumption about our place in the Universe had long gone unchallenged: […]
The neutrino is the most ghostly, rarely-interacting particle in all the Standard Model. How well can we truly make “beams” out of them?