And super-Earth, mini-Neptunes, and super-Jupiters aren’t among them. You’ll be surprised to learn why. Just 30 years ago, if you had asked an astronomer if there were planets around other stars […]
Last week, Cassini plunged into Saturn’s atmosphere. Here are the top 6 things we learned from it while it was alive. “Being a scientist and staring immensity and eternity in the […]
Finding Opportunity Where Others Think It’s Impossible In this video for Big Think+, Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, talks about how opportunity isn’t based on “disruption for […]
One of the most popular viral videos about space is dead wrong. But it gives us a chance to learn something incredible. There are a lot of moving parts to […]
Gazing upon the red, blood Moon during totality is only part of the wonders awaiting you. On July 27, 2018, the longest total lunar eclipse of the century took place. Totality […]
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 […]
How three factors come together to unfreeze the ice, and unlock the potential for extraterrestrial life. “Day after day, day after day,We stuck, nor breath nor motion;As idle as a […]
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 […]
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 […]
The Planetary Habitability Laboratory has made up some periodic tables of all of the confirmed and suspected exoplanets so far, plus planetary bodies in our own solar system.
The Cassini-Huygens telescope has spent the better part of the last two decades finding out more about our galaxy than we could possibly dream of. Here’s 14 of the coolest things it has found out.
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 […]
Unpredictable winters? Seasons that don’t line up? It’s possible with the right configuration, says physics. “Lord of Light! Come to us in our darkness. We offer you these false gods. Take […]
There’s no way to frame this as anything other than a disaster for humanity. This article was originally written one week ago, on the day the FY2019 budget was released […]
With five moons orbiting it, Pluto is the richest rocky world known to date. How did it get that way? “We really expect the mission to be transformational. This is the […]
With liquid water, an energy source, and the perfect raw ingredients, Enceladus might be the holy grail we’ve been seeking. This article is written by contributing author Jesse Shanahan. Jesse is […]
Aiming for the nearest star would necessitate a whole slew of advances. Even if the mission fails, humanity wins by investing in itself. There have been some magnificent moments in NASA […]
It does undergo nuclear fusion, but there are more reactions and more energy released from reactions other than H → He. “The sun is a miasmaOf incandescent plasmaThe sun’s not simply […]
Everything is made of quarks, leptons, photons, and gluons, yet everything comes with a finite, non-zero size. “There’s something about sitting alone in the dark that reminds you how big the […]
The ‘big discovery’ is nothing of the kind. We need a new planet-finding mission to probe the next frontier. Last week, NASA dropped a bombshell that it’s Kepler mission — the greatest […]
This isn’t an XZibit joke; it’s a real scientific question. And the answer may be that it’s possible after all. “People who work every day are kind of scared of things […]
Why Saturn’s Iapetus has three great mysteries… and we’ve only solved one of them. “The dance between darkness and light will always remain — the stars and the moon will always need the […]
If you haven’t finished your holiday shopping yet, consider these 10 gifts, good any time of year! One of the hardest things when it comes to holiday shopping is to find […]
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 […]