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An ongoing experiment aboard the International Space Station aims to find out more about the fundamentals of combustion.

Even if you remove everything you can from the Universe, some energy will still remain. Here’s what that means. Imagine, if you can, what it would mean to have a Universe […]

On the largest scales, dark matter holds the Universe together. But on small ones, it helps reveal exactly what it is… and isn’t! Dark matter is often thought of as the […]

In 2006, the IAU demoted Pluto. Here’s what we know today. In 2006, the last planet in our Solar System suffered an unforgettable insult, as Pluto — known for generations as our ninth […]

After a decade of failed attempts, scientists successfully bounced photons off of a reflector aboard the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, some 240,000 miles from Earth.

Time always moves in the same direction, but what if the Universe were contracting? As we step forward in time, a number of things always seem to happen together. Objects […]

Tyson dives into the search for alien life, dark matter, and the physics of football.

In 2006, Pluto was demoted in a very controversial decision. Unless you ignore nearly all of planetary science, it’ll never be one again.

The successor to Hubble is almost ready for launch. It’s really coming this year, too! NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, originally proposed in the 1990s, is finally slated to launch later […]

Binary pulsars are doing what no other measurement has done: measure our galactic acceleration directly. Even though the majority of the matter that makes up our Universe may be completely […]

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 […]

There are three things your new theory must do in order to be taken seriously as science. This one’s 0-for-3. Every once in a while, a revolutionary idea comes along that […]

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 […]

Mathematics is the most useful tool we have for understanding the Universe. But it doesn’t answer to anything on its own. At the frontiers of theoretical physics, many of the most […]

Researchers develop a novel method to measure gravity that can get much more information.

Astronomers spot periodic lights coming from near the black hole at the center of our galaxy.

Virtual reality continues to blur the line between the physical and the digital, and it will change our lives forever.

The “overview effect,” experienced by astronauts when they view the Earth from outer space, irrevocably changes your perspective as a human.

We used to think the Big Bang meant the universe began from a singularity. Nearly 100 years later, we’re not so sure.

Why are the rest masses of fundamental particles related like this? When it comes to the nature of matter in the Universe, the Standard Model describes the known elementary particles perfectly […]

If we were born trillions of years in the future, could we even figure out our cosmic history?

Regularities, which we associate with laws of nature, require an explanation.

Are the stellar remnants in our cosmic backyard actually our parents and grandparents?

And what can it teach us about our Solar System’s earliest days? In many ways, astronomy is unique among the sciences. In every other field, you have the ability to design […]

It’s an incredibly useful approximation. But the truth takes us far deeper. Anyone who’s ever taken a physics course has learned the same myth for centuries now: that any object thrown, […]

And do our black holes give birth to baby Universes? When it comes to our understanding of the Universe, the 20th century was full of surprises. A little over 100 […]

The drive would provide enough thrust for a spacecraft to travel near the speed of light using only electricity, says physicist Jim Woodward.

It’s massive, it’s transparent, and it’s ubiquitous. But so is our ignorance. When we look out at the Universe, we have two general ways to try and make sense of […]

Whatever’s lurking out there, it isn’t all, or even mostly, normal matter. When it comes to the Universe, it’s only natural to wonder what, exactly, it is that makes everything up. […]

From anti-gravity pens to cool model kits, these space-themed gifts will make any star gazer very happy.