Colonizing the Red Planet isn’t a bad idea in theory. But . . .
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Our planet is rare, precious, and fragile. It’s up to all of us to be its steward. With the advent of rocketry and spaceflight, our cosmic perspective changed forever. The very […]
A longstanding astronomical gap between neutron stars and black holes is finally coming to a close. Astronomy has taken us so far into the Universe, from beyond Earth to the planets, […]
If we could see in three dimensions instead of two, we’d never have thought otherwise. Perhaps the most famous sight of a dying star is the Ring Nebula, discovered in […]
Is information the fifth form of matter?
Cognitive psychologist Donald Hoffman hypothesizes we evolved to experience a collective delusion — not objective reality.
Discovered by NASA’s Chandra X-ray observatory, it’s powered by a supermassive black hole. 2019 marks 20 years of NASA’s Chandra, humanity’s most powerful X-ray observatory. Artist illustration of the Chandra X-ray […]
The Earth is getting warmer, and humans are the cause. This is why. Let’s play pretend for a moment. Pretend, if you can, that you’ve never heard about the idea of […]
A vacuum cleaner is the wrong picture. Time to bust that myth. There are no classes of object in our Universe more extreme than black holes. With so much mass present […]
What took hundreds of millions of years to create is being wasted on… party balloons? There’s a natural resource found beneath Earth’s surface that’s been building up for hundreds of […]
If this discovery came in a pre-LIGO era, maybe it would have been a surprise. But in 2019, there’s no mystery at all. Did you hear that astronomers had recently […]
When you look at the Universe in an entirely new way, you sometimes find what you could never have anticipated. Almost exactly one year ago today, the Event Horizon Telescope […]
If particles weren’t also waves, the Sun would never achieve nuclear fusion. Without quantum mechanics, life on Earth would never have come to exist. The greatest source of newly-produced energy in […]
The ‘giant impact’ that led to Earth might not have been so giant, after all. A little over 4.5 billion years ago, our Solar System began to form. Somewhere in the […]
Unbelievably enough, it all comes back to Pythagoras. One of the first theorems anyone learns in mathematics is the Pythagorean Theorem: if you have a right triangle, then the square […]
Will the small petrol state soon be solar powered?
It might seem puzzling, in a Universe bound by the speed of light, that this could be true. Here’s the science behind it. If you look out into the distant Universe, […]
It’s one way to interpret recent X-ray data, but it conflicts with much, much better data we already have. Earlier this month, a new study came out claiming something shocking: perhaps […]
Many renowned writers have revelled in the gifts of their non-native tongues.
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 […]
The Red Planet, the God of War, and important life lessons for us all.
Going mad with Christmas cheer? Try one of these alternatives.
Not everything needs a medium to travel through. If we can overcome that assumption, we don’t need the aether at all. All throughout the Universe, different types of signals propagate. Some […]
A star orbiting past our galaxy’s supermassive black hole offered a chance to test relativity as never before. The supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way is the […]
The thin ribbon is a rare and spectacular celestial phenomenon, but so much more than a mere aurora. It isn’t often that skywatchers discover a new naked-eye phenomenon in astronomy, but […]
On January 20/21, half of Earth will experience a total lunar eclipse. For the first time in 19 years, this includes all of North and South America. When the Sun, Earth, […]
Why were the Nazis so enamored with the occult, pseudoscience, and magic?
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 […]
A close encounter with cosmologist James Peebles encouraged me in my scientific career.
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Normally, the landscape in this photo would be a white ice sheet.