Shortly after planet Earth formed, life took a permanent hold on our surface. But just how common is such an outcome?
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Modern science progresses with an intensity and even irrationality that Aristotle could not fathom.
Ingenuity is remarkable. But these 5 exploration ideas are revolutionary. Telescopes are our initial tools for revealing and studying foreign worlds. Hubble images of Mars, particularly around the regions with […]
The view from beyond Pluto is far enough from Earth that we can see the stars shift. NASA’s New Horizons, humanity’s first spacecraft to encounter Pluto, is more than 4.3 billion […]
It likely isn’t the rare occurrence we once thought it was. In our Solar System, there’s one overwhelming source of mass that all the planets orbit around: our Sun. Each planet […]
The same (former) NASA engineer who previously claimed to violate Newton’s laws is now claiming to have made a warp bubble. He didn’t.
Our Solar System’s outer reaches, and what’s in them, was predicted long before the first Oort Cloud object was ever discovered.
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 […]
Phobos and Deimos only have two explanations, and neither one adds up.
As long as it remains operational, we’ll have a chance to conduct groundbreaking science with it. In the history of spaceflight, only five spacecraft ever launched by humanity possess enough energy […]
A theoretical view of a distant world so far from our Sun that our Solar System appears barely brighter than the remaining stars in the sky. ( Caltech/R. Hurt (IPAC)) Pluto […]
The theory could resolve some unanswered questions.
It’s one of only five spacecraft that will exit the Solar System, and the only one we have a chance to aim at another star. Of all the spacecraft ever launched, […]
Already 14 billion miles from the Sun, Voyager 1 is speeding away at 38,000 mph.
Halley’s comet only visits every ~76 years, but its meteors arrive twice each year. The most famous comet of all — Halley’s comet — returns to our inner Solar System every ~76 years. Halley’s comet […]
If our nearest star has an Earth-like planet, here’s how we’ll see it. As seen from up close, the signs of not only life, but our intelligent, technologically advanced human civilization […]
The largest moon in our Solar System, often overlooked, is a water-rich world. Does that mean life? Here on Earth, life took hold very early on in our planet’s history, and […]
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 […]
Science can teach us so much about our planet, but something more must compel us to take care of it. If you want to understand our planet, the best way to […]
It’s not just for Earth-like planets around Sun-like stars. Not even close. Shortly after Earth first formed first formed, life quickly took hold, thriving ever since. Both reflected sunlight on a […]
NASA’s New Horizons is the most distant technologically advanced observatory ever. And that makes all the difference. When you look at an object that’s very distant from you, how well […]
Want some crazy space phenomena? You don’t have to leave the neighborhood for it.
Over the past 30 years, we’ve revolutionized what we know about the Universe. But we couldn’t have done it without these lessons. On April 24, 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope rocketed […]
It isn’t just a day that comes every four years; it’s everything we need to keep our calendar aligned with Earth’s orbit. Once every four years, at least under most circumstances, […]
Not only can’t astronomers and planetary scientists agree, but the IAU made it worse for everyone. If you were alive in 2006, you likely remember a momentous event in astronomy: […]
How many potentially habitable planets are there? We sincerely don’t know. One of the most compelling scientific goals humanity has set for itself is to find extraterrestrial life: biological activity originating […]
I’m not saying it’s not aliens, but it’s not aliens. When it comes to life in the Universe, we still have no definitive answer to the biggest question of all, “are […]
There’s more light than we can account for, and we’ve just measured it robustly for the first time. When we look out at the darkest night skies available on Earth, even […]
They’re not just a theoretical prediction of quantum gravity. They should be detectable, too. The Universe, if you look at it closely and carefully enough, is fundamentally quantum in nature. […]
We’re still not sure what the ultimate question is. Here are 5 excellent candidates. One of the most amusing stories in all of science fiction is Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s […]