It isn’t the Big Bang or stars like the Sun that gave rise to us. The story is far more… explosive. At the smallest level, the human body is made […]
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How do you get so massive so fast? The answer could be a big problem for our standard picture of cosmology. Out in the extreme distances of the Universe, the […]
The discovery of the first-ever asteroid to arrive from interstellar space is full of lessons for us all. On October 19th, astronomers discovered an objectunlike any other we’d seen before: a […]
If December’s best natural sky show seems to get better every year, it isn’t your imagination. It’s science, and it’s spectacular! Every year, the Earth travels some 940 million kilometers […]
It isn’t just a theory; it’s the best way we have to make sense of everything that exists. “The physicist is like someone who’s watching people playing chess and, after watching […]
Here on Earth, all the right conditions occurred for intelligent life to come about, but the nearest aliens, if they’re on another world, are light years away. But it doesn’t […]
Every star dies, but not every would-be star really lives. “The origin and evolution of life are connected in the most intimate way with the origin and evolution of the stars.” […]
There have been some interesting “sightings” in the news these days.
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The most revelatory answers in life come from complex, diverse populations. Technology can open our eyes to what we’re missing and destroy our subconscious biases in one fell swoop.
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For the first time, we’ve seen neutron stars merge. At last, the gravitational and electromagnetic sky are one. “It’s becoming clear that in a sense the cosmos provides the only laboratory […]
Need more astronomical phenomena in your life? We’ve got you covered.
Even our scientific heroes can’t be right about everything. Let’s learn the lessons that they never did. In the 1960s, a young theoretical physicist named Stephen Hawking rose to prominence as […]
The first stars formed almost half a billion years before we could see their light. Here’s why. At the moment of the Big Bang, the Universe was full of matter and […]
In the far future, the last star burns out, stellar corpses get violently ejected, and galaxies accelerate away. And then the fun begins. For centuries, the biggest questions about our Universe […]
Three eyes are so much better than two. Here’s why. “Einstein’s gravitational theory, which is said to be the greatest single achievement of theoretical physics, resulted in beautiful relations connecting gravitational […]
The event horizon is real, and we know it without even needing to see it directly. “Where we’re going, we won’t need eyes to see.” –Sam Neill, Event Horizon If […]
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.
The Omega Nebula, the Eagle Nebula and Sharpless 2–54 all line up in space. Here’s a never-before-seen view of them all together! “It shows you exactly how a star is […]
There’s nothing new, recent, or remarkable about it. It’s just a typical cosmic pebble in the galactic ocean. Last year, the interstellar interloper ʻOumuamua passed through the inner Solar System. Originally […]
We’ve come so far since 2015; what do we know about dark matter now that we didn’t know then? Back in 2015, the dark matter situation was pretty straightforward: the large-scale […]
Never heard of SKA, the square kilometer array? Once it starts taking data, you’ll never forget it. “Not all chemicals are bad. Without chemicals such as hydrogen and oxygen, for […]
This could change everything we know about gravity and universal expansion.
A machine learning algorithm has shown it can discover planets from weak signals overlooked in the Kepler spacecraft’s database.
Cosmic collision yields bullion by the billions.
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Researchers said this feat concludes “one of the major challenges in modern cosmology.”
The first detections were incredible. But now the real fun — and the real science — truly begins. On August 17, the signals from two merging neutron stars reached Earth after a journey of 130 […]
“We’re opening up a whole new territory of astronomy,” One NASA official said.
IFLS might be fun for the armchair enthusiast, but couldn’t you have at least consulted an expert? “You were always a good officer. Until you weren’t.”–Saru, from Star Trek: Discovery With […]
Astronomers make the first direct observation of a phenomenon predicted by Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity.
We’ve never seen an event horizon, nor directly imaged a black hole. Thanks to a worldwide effort, victory may at last be in sight. “Never look down to test the ground […]