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MIT engineers devise a decision map to identify the best mission type to deflect an incoming asteroid.

All supernovae are not created equal. After a 14 year investigation, the brightest ones have a surprising explanation. In 2006, astronomers witnessed a supernova that defied conventional explanation. Typically, supernovae […]

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 […]

A surprise on the far side of the Moon.

Since the 1940s, NASA has been testing experimental aircraft (aka X-planes) at California’s Armstrong Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base. In the past two decades, however, the agency […]

A vacuum cleaner is the wrong picture. Time to bust that myth. There are no classes of object in our Universe more extreme than black holes. With so much mass present […]

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 […]

An amateur astronomer discovers an interstellar comet on its way to our Sun.

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 […]

A new study looks at astronauts’ brains after they come back home.

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

An Oxford scientist’s controversial theory rethinks dark matter and dark energy.

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 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 […]

What do the inventions of the future look like?

If the universe is expanding in all directions, why is Andromeda hurtling toward the Milky Way?

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 […]

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 […]

The idea that celestial objects exist within utterly immense cosmic structures is becoming inescapable.

The process of digging into hard questions makes the moment of discovery all the more satisfying.

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 […]

A lot goes into being weightless.

The present? Blink and you’ll miss it. And other musings on time.

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 […]

Is information the fifth form of matter?

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, […]

It’s one of the most consistent patterns in the unviverse. What causes it?