And if it does strike us, how much damage will it cause? Will near-Earth asteroid Apophis strike us in 2068? Generically, asteroids under ~1 km in size are irregularly shaped, will […]
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Our ultimate fate depends on something we’ve barely begun to measure. One of the biggest mysteries in all of physics is dark energy. According to our best observations, the Universe cannot […]
If we ruin the night sky too severely, ground-based astronomy could suffer tremendously. Here’s why space is no replacement. There is an existential threat to astronomy as we know it, […]
We have been rejecting science for far too long. We all need to embrace it. For as long as human civilization has existed, those societies that have embraced science have had […]
Until about a decade ago, only two habitable zone planets of any size were known to astronomers: Earth and Mars.
The raw ingredients just weren’t there. Thankfully, their predecessors were. Here on Earth, our planet practically overflows with life. After more than 4 billion years, life has spread to practically […]
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 […]
Logic puzzles can teach reasoning in a fun way that doesn’t feel like work.
Should we build a more powerful collider? A telescope that probes the Universe as never before? Absolutely. Here’s why. Every time someone proposes that we invest in fundamental science — to push the […]
Astrophysicist Michelle Thaller talks ISS and why NICER is so important.
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A new study shows white dwarf stars create an essential component of life.
Finding the Higgs boson, gravitational waves, and imaging a black hole’s event horizon were huge. There’s even more to the story. From a scientific point of view, the 2010s have been […]
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 […]
And either way, is energy or information conserved? When two things in the Universe that “always” occur meet one another, how do you know which one will win? Gravitational waves, […]
The theory could resolve some unanswered questions.
As the Universe ages, will it eventually fade away entirely? The earliest signal we’ve ever directly detected from the Universe comes to us from shortly after the Big Bang: when […]
It happened more than once, and needed to. Here’s why. If there’s one thing you can be certain about when it comes to outer space, it’s that it’s transparent, not opaque, […]
It’s 13.8 billion years old, with an uncertainty of just 1%. Here’s how. How old is the Universe? For generations, people argued over whether the Universe had always existed, whether it […]
The closest star to our own doesn’t just host one rocky planet, but a second, larger ‘super-Earth’ much farther out. Of all the stars in the Universe, the closest one to […]
And can scientists even agree on what ‘nothing’ means? The more curious we get about the great cosmic unknowns, the more unanswered questions our investigations of the Universe will reveal. […]
Scientists put the most mysterious force in the Universe to the ultimate test. When it comes to the Universe, it’s easy to make the incorrect assumption that what we see is […]
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 […]
Hubble has been operational for nearly 30 years, and still produces the most spectacular images of all. Here are this year’s best. Hubble, astronomy’s revolutionary observatory, narrowly survived last year’s gyroscope […]
Physicist Frank Wilczek proposes new methods of searching for extraterrestrial life.
A decade ago, we didn’t know if dwarf galaxies had black holes. Today, half of the ones we see aren’t where we expected. Normally, galaxies have supermassive black holes millions […]
If dark energy gets stronger with time, our fate could be an utter catastrophe. When it comes to the entire Universe, one of the biggest existential questions we’re capable of […]
Has all this happened before, and will all this happen once again? There are only a few questions, when we ask them, that force us to reckon with the fundamental nature […]
Filaments, hundreds of millions of light-years long, were just caught spinning. In our own cosmic backyard, everything we see spins, rotates, and revolves in some fashion or other. Our planet […]
And, if we have one, how close are we to it? No matter which direction we look in, or how far away our telescopes and instruments are capable of seeing, the […]
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 […]