New research proposes possible origins of the interstellar object ‘Oumuamua.
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Leap years will only get us through the next few thousand years before we have to fix it. With every year that passes, we assume that two separate things will both […]
Over the coming decades, over 100,000 new satellites are expected. For countless millennia, whenever we were faced with a clear, cloudless, moonless night, all of humanity was able to witness […]
Even after our merger with Andromeda, we might retain our spiral shape for trillions of years. You probably don’t think about it very often, but the Milky Way galaxy won’t remain […]
There are exposed planetary cores orbiting stars, and we may have already found them. When we take a look at the planets in our Solar System, there’s a pretty clear difference […]
Even extremely simple configurations in General Relativity cannot be solved exactly. Here’s the science of why. It’s difficult to appreciate how revolutionary of a transformation it is to consider the Universe […]
Or is ‘new space’ created in between the gaps of the ‘old’ space? It’s been almost 100 years since humanity first reached a revolutionary conclusion about our Universe: space itself doesn’t […]
Enough mass in one location will always create a black hole. But not all masses are possible. If you take enough mass and compress it into a small enough volume […]
For Black Hole Week, NASA released a mesmerizing animation of what a black hole probably looks like.
Since 1957, the world’s space agencies have been polluting the space above us with countless pieces of junk, threatening our technological infrastructure and ability to venture deeper into space.
100+ years ago, General Relativity came along, and Einstein gave the Universe a cosmological constant. Here’s why that was a mistake. Back in the 17th century, Isaac Newton put forth the […]
And which ones are probably examples where we’ve fooled ourselves? Every once in a while — multiple times per year — a new research finding fails to line up with our theoretical expectations. In […]
The future of cities on the Moon, Mars and orbital habitats.
We need more and better data to know, but that’s exactly what’s coming. Over the past few decades, a number of important advances have helped revolutionize our picture of the Universe. […]
Russian astrophysicists propose the Casimir Effect causes the universe’s expansion to accelerate.
It would be the ultimate method for solving our pollution or hazardous/radioactive waste problems, but we’ll never do it. Here’s why. Imagine our planet as it was for the first 4.55 […]
Is that required for detectors like LIGO and Virgo to work? Whenever any two things in the Universe interact at the same location in spacetime, one thing always remains true about […]
A colliding star may have triggered the drastic transformation.
While Mars is known as a frozen, red planet today, it has all the evidence we could ask for of a watery past, lasting for approximately the first 1.5 billion […]
At just 3 solar masses, it eliminates the “mass gap.” Searching for black holes is one of the most difficult astronomical games a scientist can play. Emitting no light of their […]
If all forms of energy experience gravitation, then why does dark energy make the expansion accelerate instead of slow down? Of all the revolutionary discoveries that we’ve made about the Universe, […]
Even though it was the crowning achievement of Einstein’s career, he was only a small part of the full story. If you were a physicist in the early 20th century, there […]
If you traveled in a straight line for far enough, would you come back to where you started? If you were to set out on a journey from anywhere on Earth’s […]
The idea of ‘absolute time’ is an illusion. Physics and subjective experience reveal why.
And, at some point, did the Milky Way lose ours? There are some 400 billion objects flying through the Milky Way galaxy with enough mass that — if they were all made of […]
General Relativity has nothing to do with light or electromagnetism at all. So how to gravitational waves know to travel at the speed of light? There are two fundamental classes of […]
Astronomers have recently discovered the most massive neutron star to date, nearly at the theoretical limit for such stars. But it’s only about the size of a small city.
Want some crazy space phenomena? You don’t have to leave the neighborhood for it.
Something isn’t adding up, but it isn’t a calibration error. It’s been nearly 100 years since we discovered that the Universe was expanding. Ever since, the scientists who study the […]