A new SETI study shows how far the field of technosignatures has come.
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The color of the shirt you’re wearing right now depends on many factors, from your eye shape to what language you speak.
Invisible cloaks. Ghost imaging. Scientists are manipulating light in ways that were once only science fiction.
The sharpest optical images, for now, come from the Hubble Space Telescope. A ground-based technique can make images over 100 times sharper.
Seeking life beyond the Solar System, we first look to the closest star systems with Earth-like planets. Here’s why that’s not good enough.
In just its first 10 hours of observations, the Vera Rubin observatory discovered more than 2000 new asteroids. What else will it teach us?
From LIGO, there weren’t enough neutron star-neutron star mergers to account for our heavy elements. With a JWST surprise, maybe they can.
“We are all in orbit around the center of the Milky Way galaxy. How big is this collection of stars? Somewhere between 200 and 400 billion suns in the Milky Way galaxy, about 100,000 light years across.”
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Only 5% of the Universe is made of normal “stuff” like we are. Could there be dark matter or dark energy life, or even aliens, out there?
The Hubble Space Telescope, launched in 1990, was originally seen as a colossal mistake. This one image, taken in 1995, changed everything.
If you think of the Big Bang as an explosion, we can trace it back to a single point-of-origin. But what if it happened everywhere at once?
The Sombrero is the closest bright, massive, edge-on galaxy to us. JWST’s new image, taken with MIRI, finally shows what’s under its hat.
Earth is actively broadcasting and actively searching for intelligent civilizations. But could our technology even detect ourselves?
Our Universe requires dark matter in order to make sense of things, astrophysically. Could massive photons do the trick?
For its 2-year science anniversary, JWST has revealed unprecedented details in “the Penguin and the Egg.” Here are the surprises inside.
The fabric of spacetime is four-dimensional, with three for space and only one for time. But wow, time sure is different from space!
There’s an old saying that “what you see is what you get.” When it comes to the Universe, however, there’s often more to the full story.
For 550 million years, neutral atoms blocked the light made in stars from traveling freely through the Universe. Here’s how it then changed.
Everything acts like a wave while it propagates, but behaves like a particle whenever it interacts. The origins of this duality go way back.
A recent measurement has simultaneously settled an ongoing scientific debate while puzzling scientists.
From a photon’s viewpoint, the Universe is timeless and dimensionless.
Looking at a dark, night sky has filled humans with a sense of awe and wonder since prehistoric times. But appearances can be deceiving.
When we see spiral galaxies, some are face-on, others are edge-on, but most are tipped at an angle. But which side is closest to us?
DESI has allowed astronomers to create an unprecedented 3D map of the Universe representing 20% of the entire sky.
Interferometry gave us a black hole’s event horizon, but that was in the radio. What can we accomplish with a new optical interferometer?
It’s the ultimate game of cosmic “cover up,” as the dimming occurs when a circumbinary disk from a nearby star passes in front of T Tauri North.
From the explosions themselves to their unique and vibrant colors, the fireworks displays we adore require quantum physics.
The Universe, although violent, is filled with creation events following destructive ones. 1850 light-years away, both types are unfolding.
Lasers, mirrors, and computational advances can all work together to push ground-based astronomy past the limits of our atmosphere.