An amateur astronomer discovers an interstellar comet on its way to our Sun.
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We still don’t know how it came to be this way. Every once in a while, we find an object in the Universe that completely mystifies us. For generations, astronomers have […]
Solid, liquid, and gas are the three everyone learns. Plasma is the fourth. But there are two more, and they’re fascinating. How many states of matter are there? When you […]
It wasn’t the birth of space and time. But it was truly essential to our cosmic story. For more than 50 years, we’ve had definitive scientific evidence that our Universe, as […]
Light cannot escape from a black hole, no matter what. But when two black holes merge? They just might. On September 14, 2015, history was made as the NSF’s twin LIGO […]
CERN’s bold new proposal has physicists confronting the biggest question of all: is building a new collider worth it? If you want to discover anything novel about the natural, physical […]
Without quantum physics, the Sun wouldn’t shine at all. Earth, as we know it, is only teeming with life because of the influence of our Sun. Its light and heat provides […]
After 13.8 billion years, there’s still a whole lot that’s changing as time goes on. With each new year that comes upon us, there are a slew of new events awaiting […]
If the universe is expanding in all directions, why is Andromeda hurtling toward the Milky Way?
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There’s some amazing science happening at the South Pole, but some very grandiose claims being made. What’s actually going on? For some of us, the idea of parallel Universes spark our […]
What do the inventions of the future look like?
An Oxford scientist’s controversial theory rethinks dark matter and dark energy.
A single thought experiment reveals a paradox. Could quantum gravity be the solution? Sometimes, if you want to understand how nature truly works, you need to break things down to […]
It’s very different from the colloquial meanings of “true-and-false” or “right-and-wrong.” In many ways, the human endeavor of science is the ultimate pursuit of truth. By asking the natural world […]
Black holes are regions of extreme gravity, but dark matter barely interacts at all. Do they play well together? Black holes are some of the most extreme objects in the […]
It’s 13.8 billion years old, with an uncertainty of just 1%. Here’s how. How old is the Universe? For generations, people argued over whether the Universe had always existed, whether it […]
The present? Blink and you’ll miss it. And other musings on time.
A lot goes into being weightless.
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Gravity and time are so different from what you’d expect. Here’s how it all would end. If you could only know the answer to one question about the Universe, what would […]
The idea that celestial objects exist within utterly immense cosmic structures is becoming inescapable.
They said the “missing half” of the Universe’s matter was just found. But what they found barely makes a dent to the big picture. When we look up into the great […]
It’s one of the most consistent patterns in the unviverse. What causes it?
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The process of digging into hard questions makes the moment of discovery all the more satisfying.
It’s often said that every element was made in a star, but there’s more to it than that.
In physics, anything that isn’t forbidden must occur. So why don’t the strong interactions violate CP-symmetry? If you ask a physicist what the biggest unsolved problem facing the field today […]
Conspiracy theories about the event dating back to the 1970s are in fact more popular than ever.
If we ruin the night sky too severely, ground-based astronomy could suffer tremendously. Here’s why space is no replacement. There is an existential threat to astronomy as we know it, […]
Is information the fifth form of matter?
If you understand gravity well enough, you might not even need a telescope to revolutionize astronomy. In science, advances arise at the intersection of theory and real-world observation. One of […]
The Red Planet, the God of War, and important life lessons for us all.