Finding a tiny planet around bright stars dozens or hundreds of light-years from Earth is extremely difficult.
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Each of our three nearest stars might have an Earth-like planet in orbit around it. Here's what we'll learn when we finally observe it.
Can two planets stably share the same orbit? Conventional wisdom says no, but a look at Saturn's moons might tell a different story.
Rituals come as much from religion as they do from the way Earth spins around the Sun.
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A Carrington-magnitude event would kill millions, and cause trillions of dollars in damage. Sadly, it isn't even the worst-case scenario.
Scientists are notoriously resistant to new ideas. Are they falling prey to groupthink? Or are our current theories just that successful?
The nearby, bright star Fomalhaut had the first optically imaged planetary candidate. Using JWST's eyes, astronomers found so much more.
The visible Universe extends 46.1 billion light-years from us, while we've probed scales down to as small as ~10^-19 meters.
Even with the quantum rules governing the Universe, there are limits to what matter can withstand. Beyond that, black holes are unavoidable.
Black holes aren't just the densest masses in the Universe, but they also spin the fastest of all massive objects. Here's why it must be so.
When we look at our Sun, its properties are incredibly constant, varying by merely ~0.1% over time. But all stars don't play by those rules.
The stars circle each other every 51 minutes, confirming a decades-old prediction.
The odds are slim, but the consequences would be literally world-ending. There really is a chance of a black hole devouring the Earth.
In revolutionary Russia, a group of forward-thinking philosophers offered an alternative to both futurism and communism.
Many planets will eventually be devoured by their parent star. For the first time, we caught a star in the act, eating its innermost planet!
Here's why the answer may forever elude scientists.
The detection of two celestial interlopers careening through our solar system has scientists eagerly anticipating more.
Voyager 2 flew past Uranus in 1986, finding a bland, featureless world. Now, in 2023, JWST's sights are similar. There's a reason for that.
You can lead an overconfident chatbot to expert knowledge, but can it actually learn and assimilate new information?
The TRAPPIST-1 system is a treasure trove of possibilities and questions. Observations by JWST have just begun.
For some reason, when we talk about the age of stars, galaxies, and the Universe, we use "years" to measure time. Can we do better?
A massive nuclear fusion experiment just hit a major milestone, potentially putting us a little closer to a future of limitless clean energy.
No planet enters retrograde more frequently than Mercury, which does so 3-4 times each year. Here’s the scientific explanation for why.
The crisis of the Anthropocene challenges our traditional narratives and myths about humanity's place in the world. Citizen science can help.
In 1924, Edwin Hubble found proof that the Milky Way isn't the only galaxy in the Universe.
With the invention of the leap year, the Julian calendar was used worldwide for over 1500 years. Over time, it led only to catastrophe.
The nature of civilizational threats has changed in a mere decade.
The strongest tests of curved space are only possible around the lowest-mass black holes of all. Their small event horizons are the key.
Earth wasn't created until more than 9 billion years after the Big Bang. In some lucky places, life could have arisen almost right away.
Please stop calling our Sun an "average star." It is philosophically dubious and astronomically incorrect.