Maybe 100% of stars don’t have planets, after all. When stars form in the Universe, they’re created in giant bursts. A stellar nursery in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy […]
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Have any of the stars we can see burned themselves out completely? When we look out across the Universe, we’re also peering back in time. In the early 21st-century, we’ve […]
Playing and being creative shouldn't stop when you grow up.
Telescopes from the ground are bigger, but have to fight the atmosphere. Here’s how to win. In astronomy, seeing farther and fainter than ever before requires three simultaneous approaches. First light, […]
Here are the best answers science has to a myriad of commonly asked questions. Over the past 12 months, the status of humans on planet Earth has changed dramatically. The […]
We still don’t know what dark matter is, but at least we now know what it’s not. When it comes to science, we often say that it only takes a single […]
The new record-holder opens up a literal Universe full of possibilities. Someday, even our own Sun will eventually run out of hydrogen fuel in its core, bringing a tremendous set […]
In his new book, "Forward: Notes on the Future of Our Democracy," former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang explores how media narratives can warp public perception of political candidates.
For the cosmos, it’s all too easy being green. Stars come in a wide variety of colors, but never green. Stars form in a wide variety of sizes, colors and masses, […]
The Big Theoretical Physics Problem At The Center Of The ‘Muon g-2’ Puzzle In early April, 2021, the experimental physics community announced an enormous victory: they had measured the muon’s magnetic […]
Dennis Klatt developed trailblazing text-to-speech systems before losing his own voice to cancer.
The Sun produces a wide variety of particles and radiation throughout it, but all of its neutrinos are produced in the core: where nuclear reactions take place. The various reactions […]
And can we devise an experiment to tell, even when we aren’t looking? One of the most bizarre aspects of quantum physics is that the fundamental entities that make up the […]
'Critical Tourist Map of Oslo' offers uniquely dark perspective on Norway's capital.
All scientific theories, at some level, are wrong. That’s why consensus is so vital. There are two important and common words that, when used scientifically, have a very different meaning than […]
The second in a three-part series on the history of research on the origin of life.
The rings are raining down onto the planet, and disappearing surprisingly fast. 4.5 billion years ago, our Solar System first formed. Protoplanetary disks, which all solar systems are thought to […]
The NICER experiment, designed to measure neutron stars as never before, just released their first pulsar map, and it’s amazing. After typical supernovae, remnant collapsed cores of matter are left behind. […]
It’s massive, it’s transparent, and it’s ubiquitous. But so is our ignorance. When we look out at the Universe, we have two general ways to try and make sense of […]
From the mid-19th century, fossils were used as evidence for continental drift – but mainstream scientists didn't buy it until the 1950s.
Astronomy’s enduring quest is to go farther, fainter, and more detailed than ever before. Here’s the edge of the cosmic frontier. Astronomers have always sought to push back the viewable […]
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 […]
It’s how successful our current theories are. Some 500 years ago, there was one scientific phenomenon that was, without controversy, extremely well-understood: the motion of the celestial objects in the sky. […]
Can passenger airships make a triumphantly 'green' comeback?
If dark matter is fundamentally different from the normal matter we know, there should be a way to test it. Here are the results. Dark matter — despite the enormous indirect evidence for […]
A song many consider the black national anthem rises again in the United States.
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Hubble has been operational for nearly 30 years, and still produces the most spectacular images of all. Here are this year’s best. Hubble, astronomy’s revolutionary observatory, narrowly survived last year’s gyroscope […]
The laws of physics are not time-reversal invariant. Here’s how we know. No matter when, where, or what you are in the Universe, you experience time in only one direction: forwards. […]
If everything eventually dies and decays, is there a way to prolong the inevitable? Our Universe, as it exists today, puts us in an incredibly privileged position. Had we come […]