Journalist Ronan Farrow says he’s not a great negotiator, but he’s certainly had a unique opportunity to see how one works. Just out of law school, he was recruited by […]
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New research based on observational data from the Spitzer telescope provides clues as to how the universe first emerged from its dark age.
Sometimes, the simplest questions of all are the most difficult to meaningfully answer. If you were to take any tiny piece of matter in our known Universe and break it […]
What will it take to conquer our immemorial space dream?
If an AT-AT walker (or something even larger) wanted to walk across a frozen lake, how thick would the ice have to be? Each winter, one of the most spectacular phenomena […]
The Universe began almost perfectly uniform, while today, it’s anything but. Here’s how we grew up. One of the strangest facts about the Universe is how dramatically its changed over time. […]
What took hundreds of millions of years to create is being wasted on… party balloons? There’s a natural resource found beneath Earth’s surface that’s been building up for hundreds of […]
Physicists sure do give counterintuitive names to the things they find. Most of us are confounded by the idea of relativity when we first encounter it. Objects don’t just move through […]
It’s exotic, incredibly cold stuff.
Some claim that inflation isn’t science, but it sure has made some incredibly successful scientific predictions. So, you want to know how the Universe began? You’re not alone. Every other […]
Somehow, the Universe began with just the right mix of cosmic ingredients to make life possible. It sure doesn’t seem likely. When you take stock of what’s in the Universe on […]
A new computer model solves a pair of Jovian riddles.
China’s Chang’e 4 biosphere experiment marks a first for humankind.
If you think about the way a gravitational wave detector works, you might encounter a paradox. Here’s the solution. One of the greatest scientific achievements in all of human history […]
Despite what you may have heard, they don’t suck anything in at all. Black holes are some of the strangest, most wondrous objects in all the Universe. With huge amounts of […]
One of Stephen Hawking’s predictions seems to have been borne out in a man-made “black hole.”
A new NASA report shakes up lunar geology.
Dark matter’s naysayers latched onto one tiny puzzle. This new find may have solved it completely. Imagine the largest cosmic smashup you can. Take the largest gravitationally bound structures we […]
The laws of physics are not time-reversal invariant. Here’s how we know. No matter when, where, or what you are in the Universe, you experience time in only one direction: forwards. […]
Some galaxies might not have any dark matter. Here’s why you should care. There are two assumptions that everyone makes about the Universe for extremely good reasons, but they might not […]
Three scientists publish a paper proving that Mercury, not Venus, is the closest planet to Earth.
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When the Universe expands, photons redshift to longer wavelengths and lower energies. So where does that energy go? Imagine the ultimate version of a toy Universe: it’s expanding, it’s full of […]
Dark matter is our leading theory for a reason. New, detailed studies of the smallest galaxies could kill off the most studied alternative. When you look out at the Universe, […]
30 years later, a new investigative documentary on Bob Lazar’s claims about Area 51 raises some ghosts, some hell, and some unsettling questions.
A longstanding astronomical gap between neutron stars and black holes is finally coming to a close. Astronomy has taken us so far into the Universe, from beyond Earth to the planets, […]
At the core of the largest star-forming region of the Local Group sits the biggest star we know of. Mass is the single most important astronomical property in determining the lives […]
The coin depicts a black hole and one of the late physicist’s most important formulas.
