These cosmic behemoths were enormous from very early times. Here’s how they came to be. One of the biggest challenges for modern astrophysics is to describe how the Universe went from […]
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Jim Peebles, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz just won the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics. It couldn’t be more well-deserved. Every year, the Nobel Prize reminds all of humanity to […]
If we find the earliest signal from the Universe’s birth, how can we be sure we aren’t fooling ourselves? When it comes to the origin of the Universe, the Big […]
Earth wasn’t the only potentially habitable planet in the early Solar System. What happened to Mars? If you could travel back in time to the early stages of the Solar System, […]
Every physical theory has constants in it. The gravitational constant is remarkably uncertain. When we first began formulating physical laws, we did so empirically: through experiments. Drop a ball off […]
Doomsday prophesies have never once come to pass, but they’ve never had science on their side like this before. Every year, the Earth completes an orbital revolution around the Sun, returning […]
It’s a rare occasion for orbits to align so perfectly. Enjoy the sights this Tuesday. On Tuesday, February 19th, the Moon will reach perigee, its closest point of approach to planet […]
They may have arisen less than 200 million years after the Big Bang, but the Universe was a very different place back then. When you look out beyond the Milky Way […]
If you think you have problems today, be glad you’re not moving at the speed of light. Special relativity, even though it’s over 100 years old, is still one of the […]
In a breakthrough for nuclear fusion research, scientists at China’s Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) reactor have produced temperatures necessary for nuclear fusion on Earth.
The dream of multi-messenger astronomy is to seen an event with gravitational waves, neutrinos, and light all together. The newest candidate just might get us there. When it comes to cataclysmic […]
Dark matter feels fake. MOND sounds plausible. What should you conclude? Imagine I told you that everything you ever saw, touched, or experienced — in this world and in the Universe beyond — was […]
The line between science and pseudoscience is imperceptible to most. Here’s how you can catch it in yourself. When it comes to science, the first principle is that you must […]
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As one of the biggest manmade structures in the sky and at a cost of over $100b, it’s the place where the space age dream is still alive.
Our planet is rare, precious, and fragile. It’s up to all of us to be its steward. With the advent of rocketry and spaceflight, our cosmic perspective changed forever. The very […]
After Kepler but before James Webb, TESS is preparing astronomers for the coming exoplanet revolution. There are always new discoveries and achievements occurring in science, and certain fields have experienced […]
The hallmark of a good scientist is changing your mind when new evidence arises. Here’s what that looks like. Science, like many things in life, is always a work-in-progress. While a […]
Our motion through space is undeniable. So why can’t we feel it? Our planet isn’t the stationary place we feel it to be beneath our feet, but rather moves in an […]
Even if we don’t destroy ourselves, we always have the Universe to contend with. Wiping out all life on Earth is hard, but causing mass extinctions is easy. The 1991 eruption […]
There are rules absolutely forbidding it from happening. But some particles do it anyway. All the matter we know of in the Universe is made up of Standard Model particles. Photons […]
If you accept cosmic inflation and quantum physics, there’s no way out. The Multiverse is real. Look out at the Universe all you want, with arbitrarily powerful technology, and you’ll never […]
The result validate Einstein on a whole new scale, and pose serious problems for alternative, modified theories of gravity. In 1915, Albert Einstein put forth a new theory of gravity: General […]
What happened 4.56 billion years ago is the most important part of the cosmic story ever to happen to us. If you were to look at our Universe at the time […]
In 2015, Ed Witten, the greatest living string theorist, wrote a piece on why. Here’s the version for everyone. It’s one of the most brilliant, controversial and unproven ideas in […]
Astronauts aren’t floating in space, they’re free falling—and so are you. Here’s the amazing science behind so-called zero gravity.
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If spacetime is like a fabric, and mass bends it, what flattens it back out again? Matter tells space how to curve, and curved space tells matter how to move. That’s […]
No matter how long you wait, the matter that makes you probably won’t end up inside a black hole. It’s one of the most pervasive ideas out there: if you wait […]
Feel like traveling to another dimension? Better choose your black hole wisely.