If you accept cosmic inflation and quantum physics, there’s no way out. The Multiverse is real. Look out at the Universe all you want, with arbitrarily powerful technology, and you’ll never […]
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Intelligent aliens, if they exist in the galaxy or the Universe, might be detectable from a variety of signals: electromagnetic, from planet modification, or because they’re spacefaring. But we haven’t […]
There are millions of asteroids in the solar system. A new study might tell us where they came from.
Finding the ingredients for life is a very different prospect than finding the products of life. Perhaps the greatest quest in science today is to find life that originated beyond Earth. […]
New research on the hypothalamus shows that body heat matters.
The result validate Einstein on a whole new scale, and pose serious problems for alternative, modified theories of gravity. In 1915, Albert Einstein put forth a new theory of gravity: General […]
The most unusual star known has finally had its dimming scientifically explained. Here’s the unusual, dusty resolution. The science of planet-hunting has truly taken off in the 21st century, with […]
Dark energy is pushing distant galaxies apart from one another at an increasing rate. If the Big Rip hypothesis is true, things will only get worse from here. One of the […]
Gravity gets weaker as the distance squared. But gravitational waves only get weaker as the distance. Why? One of the things we often just accept about the world is that […]
Before we formed stars, atoms, elements, or even got rid of our antimatter, the Big Bang made neutrinos. And we found them. The idea of the Big Bang has captivated the […]
When it comes to flirting, love meters have nothing on these researchers’ findings.
NASA’s Chandra X-ray observatory has shown us the Universe like nothing else ever before. When it comes to the Universe, it mainly generates X-rays through high-temperature heating. X-rays from Chandra reveal […]
All of this has happened before… but not like this! As the year draws to a close, we approach a very special time of year, at least from an astronomical perspective. […]
A little peek into our past reveals tantalizing details.
South Africa is no longer the only place on the continent that has urban wealth clusters
A rare, ultra-diffuse galaxy is full of stars and not much else. Here’s how to make sense of it. One of the greatest puzzles in the entire Universe is the dark […]
Elegance, beauty, and mathematical precision makes for a compelling story and an exquisite model. But it doesn’t make it right. Scientific theories, at their best, are simple, straightforward, full of predictive […]
In the search for the youngest planet in the Universe, astronomers may have accidentally stumbled upon something entirely new. Growing up is hard to do in the Universe. In the great […]
When we place the known objects in the Solar System in order, four inner, rocky worlds and four, outer, giant worlds stand out. Traditionally, these were defined as planets. Will […]
For every planet that orbits a star like our own, there are likely thousands of ‘orphan planets’ wandering the galaxy alone. Here in the Solar System, we can watch our star’s […]
LIGO, here on Earth, has exquisitely-precise distances its lasers travel. With three spacecrafts in motion, how could LISA work? Since it began operating in 2015, advanced LIGO has ushered in an […]
Are we standing on the brink of Mutually Assured Destruction?
Traveling to Mars is going to be hard. Not going completely bonkers when we’re there may be even harder.
At ground zero, Trinitite, the green, glassy substance found in the area, is still radioactive and must not be picked up. The Trinity Site was where the first atomic bomb […]
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.
Dark matter is one of the most puzzling, unintuitive concepts in all of physics. But we still need it. Our Universe isn’t like us. While we’re made of atoms, and other […]
20 years ago, we discovered that distant galaxies were accelerating away from us. Here’s how the Universe makes it happen. Matter and energy tell spacetime how to curve; curved spacetime tells […]
Instead of nearly-circular ellipses, comets are extraordinarily elongated, or even on an exit path. Why so different? When you look at how the planets orbit in our Solar System, the […]
These three reasons are why there’s no getting around the fact that astronomy needs the James Webb Space Telescope. Even the most powerful telescope in history, the Hubble Space Telescope, […]
They were a little optimistic in 1912, but they understood that adding carbon to the atmosphere has side effects.