From millions of miles to millions of light years, there’s nothing else that leaves trails like this. When you point your telescope at the distant Universe, observing a faint, massive object […]
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For more than 10 billion years, the star-formation rate across the Universe has been plummeting. Here’s the story. Take a look at a wide variety of galaxies in the Universe, and […]
The ices and rock aren’t green, and neither are the tails. So where does a comet’s green color come from? Every so often, with extreme regularity, comets will plunge from beyond […]
And if their conclusions will be different from ours, how can we be certain we’ve got it right? One of the greatest dangers in all of science is jumping to false […]
If you haven’t finished your holiday shopping yet, consider these 10 gifts, good any time of year! One of the hardest things when it comes to holiday shopping is to find […]
An Oxford physicist tries to cast doubt on dark energy, but the data says otherwise. It was a mere 20 years ago that our picture of the Universe got a […]
The solar neighborhood is so different than people imagine. But for the first time, we know what it’s like. When you look up at the stars in the night sky, they […]
Representation matters. Meet five stellar women in physics who were unjustly denied their place in history. Nobel season is now over, with another year in the books of celebrating the scientists […]
Digging deeper into last week’s revelations about the Red Planet.
In the aftermath of everything we’ve learned about what’s in the Universe, we can make much better estimates of how many alien civilizations are out there. In 1961, scientist Frank Drake […]
The ELT, at 39 meters in diameter, will dwarf everything that’s ever come before. “There are so many people who are arguing or fighting over issues which don’t have much relevance. […]
A recent study points to the possibility that just 70,000 years ago, a star passed through our Solar System. How often does this happen, and what are the consequences? We […]
A new podcast tells the incredible tale of the next great leap into the Universe “And so far as I’m concerned, I’m not going to run a program that’s just a […]
Two major galaxies in the local group are already in the process of being devoured by us… and each other. The Milky Way is the second-largest galaxy in our local group, […]
It took the Universe 9.2 billion years to create the Earth, and another 4 billion for complex life. Could we have gotten there faster? The story of how the Universe came […]
They may have arisen less than 200 million years after the Big Bang, but the Universe was a very different place back then. When you look out beyond the Milky Way […]
If you think we’ve seen all there is to see in the Universe, you’re about to have your imagination unlocked. “Hubble often takes images of distant gravitationally lensed galaxies to […]
The ‘big discovery’ is nothing of the kind. We need a new planet-finding mission to probe the next frontier. Last week, NASA dropped a bombshell that it’s Kepler mission — the greatest […]
It’s time to bust one of the biggest myths about where the night sky’s most spectacular, seasonal shows come from. Meteor showers are one of the night sky’s most spectacular sights […]
The West has been doing well scientifically for a few hundred years now, but it took almost a thousand years for it to catch up to the Middle East. Here are ten of the biggest discoveries the Islamic world got first.
They’re less than a billion years old. And, thanks to ALMA, they might finally pave the way to understanding how galaxies form. How do galaxies like our Milky Way come to […]
With a 5-10 year warning, we could develop a plan to change an asteroid’s trajectory.
For just a year’s worth of US Military budget, we could transform the world. The United States spends more on military spending than the next ten nations combined: an estimated $600 […]
The hallmark of a good scientist is changing your mind when new evidence arises. Here’s what that looks like. Science, like many things in life, is always a work-in-progress. While a […]
With hundreds of billions of stars burning bright, ‘dead’ seems like a bit of an exaggeration. But every galaxy is headed for this fate, including ours. As long as a […]
Are we looking for life in all the wrong ways, like SETI with smoke signals? A little over 80 years ago, humanity first began broadcasting radio and television signals with enough […]
A very clever idea says there’s a ninth Solar System planet, larger than Earth, far beyond Neptune. Here’s why most scientists think it’s not real. It’s been nearly three years since […]
It would be disappointing and surprising if Earth were the only template for habitability in the Universe.
What if entanglement also occurs across time? Is there such a thing as temporal nonlocality?
How did black holes get so supermassive so fast? Astrophysics may be about to find out, thanks to three big 2017 discoveries. There’s a big problem when we look at […]