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 […]
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For Black Hole Week, NASA released a mesmerizing animation of what a black hole probably looks like.
It’s that the Universe can be understood at all. Don’t deafen yourself to its lessons. In a nutshell, 2020 has been a unique year in human history. For the first time […]
This space expansionist ideology marked the beginning of what Arendt called “earth alienation.”
If dark matter is fundamentally different from the normal matter we know, there should be a way to test it. Here are the results. Dark matter — despite the enormous indirect evidence for […]
The Red Planet, the God of War, and important life lessons for us all.
Why did the dinosaurs go extinct? Because they didn’t have a space program.
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We have two ways of measuring the expansion rate. Here’s the harder one. If you want to understand where our Universe came from and where it’s going, you need to measure […]
The most famous ‘supernova impostor’ of all could have died back in the 1840s. Here’s what we think kept it alive. In all of astronomy, no stellar event releases more energy […]
After Kepler but before James Webb, TESS is preparing astronomers for the coming exoplanet revolution. There are always new discoveries and achievements occurring in science, and certain fields have experienced […]
With just a few more neutron star mergers, we’ll have the best constraints of all-time. How fast is the Universe expanding? Ever since the expanding Universe was first discovered nearly […]
Scientists say it might even rain on the exoplanet, dubbed K2-18b.
The center of our Sun tops out at 15 million K, but nuclear bombs can get nearly 20 times hotter. Here’s how. In terms of raw energy output, nothing on our […]
How does one supernova get so bright, so energetic, and so massive? It’s a spectacular mystery to solve. On February 22, 2016, one of humanity’s automated sky-scanning telescopes — the Pan-STARRS Survey for […]
What we’ve seen isn’t necessarily what we get, but the most common world doesn’t look like ours. There’s a very common myth out there in astronomy: the idea that the Sun […]
A new paper suggests a primordial black hole may be making things weird at the edge of our solar system.
Two stellar mass black holes, if they merge in the vicinity of a supermassive black hole, could have their gravitational wave signal affected by the strongly curved space around them. […]
For years, astronomers have been puzzled by an excess of antimatter particles. Unfortunately, dark matter is probably not the solution. When you look out at the Universe, what you see […]
The spacecraft is set to come closer to the star than any other Sun-facing camera before it.
It’s made up of scores of telescopes at many different sites across the world. But it acts like one giant telescope. Here’s how. If you want to observe the Universe more […]
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 […]
Even before MMA was a combat sport, it was a unique type of astronomy. Today, it’s opening up the Universe as never before. On February 24, 1987, a spectacular signal was […]
If we want our conclusions to be meaningful, our data had better be robust. When it comes to the Universe, there’s a whole lot that doesn’t add up. All the matter […]
If there’s no phosphine, there’s no indirect evidence for biological activity there. In one of the biggest surprises in the history of planetary science, a September 2020 study announced the presence […]
Once only dark energy remains, empty space still won’t be completely empty. Imagine, if you dare, the very end of the Universe. The stars — past, present, and future — have all burned out. […]
An Oxford scientist claims a Nobel-Prize-winning conclusion is wrong.
A lifelong fan on why she’s drawn to the magnificent gas giant.
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It’s the technique, from the Event Horizon Telescope, that brought us a black hole’s image. Here’s how it works. The Event Horizon Telescope has accomplished what no other telescope or telescope […]
Now that we’ve seen our first one, we want more, and we want them better. Here’s how to get there. To resolve any astronomical object, you must achieve resolutions superior to […]
Despite its changing shape and its unprecedented dimming, a supernova this year, decade, or even century is highly unlikely. For months, skywatchers have enjoyed a view of the night sky […]