Even 13.8 billion years after the Big Bang, we can reconstruct the first 3 minutes. About 100 years ago, we began to truly understand the nature of the Universe for the […]
Oops! That page can’t be found.
It looks like nothing was found at this location. Maybe try a search?
Were you looking for something like this?
The Big Bang is our accepted origin of the Universe. But is there another possibility? Since the mid-1960s and the discovery of the Cosmic Microwave Background, the Big Bang has […]
Deniers will never stop misleading others. Here’s the truth. Every so often, advocates of a fringe theory — one that doesn’t fit the evidence as well as the mainstream theory — do what they can […]
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 […]
Enough mass in one location will always create a black hole. But not all masses are possible. If you take enough mass and compress it into a small enough volume […]
It’s not a gambit. It’s not fraud. It’s not an opinion. And it’s not biased like you think it is. Most of us, when we think about what science is, default […]
The Crab Nebula goes back to 1054, opening a window into our cosmic past. On July 4, 1054, Chinese astronomers recorded a “guest star” in the Taurus constellation. A ‘guest star’ […]
Demanding appropriate levels of skepticism and scrutiny isn’t cruelty, but rather demonstrates scientific integrity and intellectual honesty. Every few months, a novel headline will fly across the world, claiming to […]
The history of the Universe is forever imprinted in our own bodies. We can learn a lot about the history of the Universe just by looking at each of our own […]
Forgetting them, at any step, can lead to unscientific conclusions. No one, not even the smartest among us, were competent scientists from the outset. The concept of science is simple […]
A single lifetime is more than enough to take you to the limits of the Universe. Right now, there are only three things limiting how far our spacecrafts can take […]
The definitive answer requires better, unbiased data. Despite all the advances that have occurred in human history, one extraordinary puzzle still remains right in our own backyard: we aren’t sure how […]
Almost certainly not. Here’s the science of why. The Universe, as we know it, simply doesn’t add up. On the one hand, we can look out on a cosmic scale and […]
And what might we learn as we collect new, never-before-seen data? If you took one of history’s top scientists from 100 years ago and dropped them into today’s world, what […]
The theoretical reasons to expect it are compelling, but the technology required to detect it is unfathomable. All throughout our galaxy, millions of black holes of a variety of masses […]
Scientific surprises are often how science advances. But more often than not, they’re just bad science. When you’re a scientist, getting an unexpected result can be a double-edged sword. The best […]
Our Universe is 13.8 billion years old, and our Sun formed about 2/3rds of the way through. Here’s what came before it. When it comes to the great cosmic question of […]
She’s not a scientist, an expert, or even an adult. But she’s got one good lesson to teach us all. Like most people on Earth, Greta Thunberg is not a climate […]
There’s no such thing as a theory that’s too beautiful to be wrong, if it doesn’t agree with experiment. The history of physics is filled with great ideas that you’ve […]
There have been a lot of public advocates from the “no dark matter” camp, getting lots of popular attention. But the Universe still needs dark matter. Here’s why. If you took […]
If dark energy were stronger or weaker, everything would be pretty much the same. And that’s a puzzle. After the Big Bang, the Universe was full of matter and radiation. It […]
It’s the first, most naive question you might think to ask. The solution is a lot more complicated than you imagine. According to a large amount of evidence, the overwhelming majority […]
We see matter, but not antimatter, in our Universe. Could black holes be the answer? One of the greatest cosmic puzzles in our entire Universe is why there’s so much more […]
We always assume that dark matter is particle-based, and we just need to find which particle it is. But what if it isn’t so? Everything we’ve ever detected in the Universe, […]
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 […]
Now we know, on every scale. “There is no such thing as perpetual tranquillity of mind while we live here; because life itself is but motion, and can never be without […]
If the Big Bang happened and everything is moving away from us, where’s the center? “I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out […]
Did they perform their analysis sub-optimally? Maybe. But gravitational waves were seen no matter what. “We hope that interested people will repeat our calculations and will make up their own minds […]
A live-blog event happened a week ago, but you can catch the entire thing anew here, right now! “We have never observed infinity in nature. Whenever you have infinities in […]
Could the Universe have been born completely uniform and still given rise to us? “First, you should check out my house. It’s, like, kinda lame, but way less lame than, like, […]