What we can see extends for 46.1 billion light years in all directions today. So how big was it at birth? “They say it all started out with a big bang. […]
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Hawking’s greatest achievement is also the greatest source of misunderstanding. “Maybe that is our mistake: maybe there are no particle positions and velocities, but only waves. It is just that […]
And it couldn’t have done it without the heat from our world. “Cheap little rhymesA cheap little tuneAre sometimes as dangerousAs a sliver of the moon.” –Langston Hughes If you’ve ever […]
Is looking for radio transmissions in space like claiming the lack of smoke signals means there are no modern humans? “[W]hat Fermi immediately realized was that the aliens have had […]
It’s not breaking news that the universe is slowly dying. It is significant that scientists have been able to finally measure the degree to which it’s dying. Let’s just say you should push up any appointments you might have 100 billion years from now.
A blue cosmic curtain can only mean one thing. “Life is a mirror and will reflect back to the thinker what he thinks into it.”-Ernest Holmes Image credit: ESO/Igor Chekalin, […]
Govert Schilling’s new book deserves a place in everyone’s life. “Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere.” –Carl Sagan Imagine the […]
See as far back in the Universe as our greatest telescope’s eyes will take us. “It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. […]
Stars are born, live and die, but their light tells a remarkable story that changes over time. “Aristotle taught that stars are made of a different matter than the four […]
The most powerful telescope in history will never see the farthest galaxy. “No distance of place or lapse of time can lessen the friendship of those who are thoroughly persuaded […]
Before NASA’s Dawn spacecraft found white weirdness on Ceres, it had a close encounter with the second largest asteroid: Vesta. “I have announced this star as a comet, but since […]
By Ethan SiegelImages: NASA, Francis Godwin, OSA As part of the Space Glass project — Ethan Seigel, astrophysicist, science communicator & NASA columnist explains how technology, imagination and our desires come together […]
Even the cosmic home where our Solar System resides will someday meet it’s demise. But how? “Unless one says goodbye to what one loves, and unless one travels to completely new […]
Nature’s games aren’t all “red in tooth and claw” competitions. Evolution also contains cooperation. And Game Theory provides the tools (“behavioral telescopes”) to show how cooperation can improve evolutionary fitness.
If you saw the lunar eclipse from a city, here’s what you missed. “The reports of the eclipse parties not only described the scientific observations in great detail, but also […]
Spiral galaxies have a skeleton-like structure that supports them. See the Milky Way’s first discovered bone! “The progress of science is strewn, like an ancient desert trail, with the bleached […]
After the CMB, before the first stars, there was nothing to see. Or was there? “[I]f there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we […]
The most important lessons about Earth come from looking outward. “We came all this way to explore the Moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.” […]
Where new stars and the matter they form from fight for dominance. “People get cranky when you burst their bubble. Over time, advances in astronomy have relentlessly reinforced the utter […]
Our Sun gets its energy from fusion in its core. But can any light be made from the surface? “Birds sing after a storm; why shouldn’t people feel as free […]
The “constant points of light” in the sky are often anything but. “To be is to be the value of a variable.” –Willard Van Orman Quine We look up at […]
All you need are clear skies, a telescope, and a plan. Make it a great one. “For my confirmation, I didn’t get a watch and my first pair of long […]
Live long and prosper…and try not to hit us, please.
With Hubble, Spitzer and Chandra combined, we get a view like no other. “But I see it differently now. There has to be a middle. Without it, nothing can truly […]
Obscured by our galactic plane, this once-unknown sight of the southern skies — Westerlund 2 — may house the Milky Way’s next supernova! “The wonder is, not that the field of the stars is […]
The Spitzer Space Telescope has imaged our entire galactic plane in the infrared, and it’s a 180,000 pixel spectacular. “Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a […]
For the 1960s generation, however, “the day the music died” was July 25, 1965 — the day when Bob Dylan crashed the 1965 Newport Folk Festival stage with an electric guitar in front of him and rock band behind him to rip into a loud, raucous version of his new hit, “Like a Rolling Stone.”
Discovering the face of Earth’s sister planet, Venus, beneath its cloudy veil. “Now, Venus is an extremely hostile environment, and as such presents a lot of challenges for a science […]
How an experiment high above Antarctica — Spider — sheds new light on the cosmic microwave background. Observations of the cosmic microwave background continue to capture public attention, highlighted these last few weeks in […]
How tides, gravity and lava give Io the youngest surface in the Solar System. “The crust, being so thin, must bend, if, over wide areas, it becomes loaded with glacial […]