Astrophysics has probed a test of a fundamental law, ‘Lorentz invariance,’ well beyond the LHC’s limits. Einstein is still right. The greatest scientific legacy that Albert Einstein left us is this: […]
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The expansion rate is dropping, but distant galaxies are accelerating. Here’s how. If you take a look at any galaxy in the Universe that isn’t gravitationally bound to our own, we’ve […]
With radio and X-ray data combined, we’re understanding how energy flows like never before. When we look out at the Universe on the largest cosmic scales of all, gravity is the […]
And why, even at its faintest, it always outshines every other star and planet. If you’ve been looking to the west after sunset recently, you may have noticed that there’s one […]
The sacrifices of early astronauts paved the way for Apollo’s successes, and so much more. In all of history, only 24 humans have ever escaped Earth’s gravity. The very first launch […]
A new survey, the DESI Legacy Imaging Survey, has found more lenses than all others put together. One of Einstein’s most revolutionary predictions is that mass bends light. During a […]
The first Earth-sized planet without a parent star has just been discovered. For countless millennia, planets beyond our Solar System were mere speculation. Today, we know of over 4,000 confirmed […]
On the largest scales, galaxies don’t simply clump together, but form superclusters. Too bad they don’t remain bound together.
We give it the flight plan, and it takes care of the rest. It has to. Here’s why. No matter how advanced our technology becomes, there are certain limits that can […]
Gravitational wave researchers observe black holes of different sizes colliding for the first time.
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How two seemingly distinct exoplanet systems turned out to be related. Practically every star in the Milky Way has a similar origin story. At some point in the past, a molecular […]
Grandfathers, take heart. You’ll survive the paradox that’s been gunning for you since the 1930s.
If it weren’t for a subatomic quantum rule, our Universe would be vastly different. In many ways, our views of the distant Universe are the closest things we’ll ever get […]
Physicists create quantum entanglement, making two distant objects behave as one.
Introducing the Deep Space Food Challenge.
The inside of every black hole leads to the birth of a new Universe. Could our Universe have arisen from one?
If you think life on Earth is hard, wait until you see Mars. If you think life on Earth is hard, try living on Mars. Mars, as photographed from the surface […]
Just because an idea is fashionable doesn’t mean it’s relevant for our Universe. One of the greatest unsolved puzzles in all of science is dark energy. The Universe isn’t just […]
Everything is being driven apart. But there’s hope of reaching what’s currently so far away. For the first 7.8 billion years, the Universe unfolded exactly as scientists would have expected in […]
We still don’t know how the information encoded onto it gets out. No matter what you do in the Universe, its overall entropy always increases. Even when we put things in […]
As this map of Bouguer’s gravity anomaly shows, the pull of the earth varies considerably by region.
Roger Penrose used mathematics to show black holes actually exist. Andrea Ghez and Reinhard Genzel helped uncover what lies at the center of our galaxy.
We might live in a quantum Universe, but we’ll violate the principle of relativity if space is discrete. If you try and divide matter into smaller and smaller chunks, you’ll […]
The new record-holder opens up a literal Universe full of possibilities. Someday, even our own Sun will eventually run out of hydrogen fuel in its core, bringing a tremendous set […]
A Mercury-bound spacecraft’s noisy flyby of our home planet.
The theoretical reasons to expect it are compelling, but the technology required to detect it is unfathomable. All throughout our galaxy, millions of black holes of a variety of masses […]
A 2020 space mission wants to use zero gravity to disable some of the hardest cancers to fight.
Physics demands that it couldn’t be any other way. Here’s why. Ask anyone — even someone with no background in science — to name something that Einstein did, and odds are they’ll come back with […]
If you want to understand what the Universe is, how it began, evolved, and will eventually end, astrophysics is the only way to go.