Several things in nature go faster than the speed of light, without challenging general relativity.
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The Universe is expanding, but different techniques can’t agree on how fast. No matter what, something major has got to give. Look out at a distant galaxy, and you’ll see it […]
The thick sheets of ice at these eight sites could provide the reservoir of water necessary for human expeditions to Mars.
It’s one of the most common tropes in science fiction. But which movies actually get the science right? The way we travel through time, at a speed of one second per […]
One of astronomy’s most iconic sights in an artifact of faulty optics. Here’s how a new, great design will overcome it. When you look out at the greatest images of the […]
Just one equation relates the expansion of space to all the matter and energy we have. If you know this, you can know the fate of the Universe. Last week, […]
We speak about it, argue over it, and even fight wars for it. We know it when we see it. But just what is energy, anyway? When it comes to being […]
NASA and SETI invite the public to nickname a small icy world, or pair of worlds, in the distant Kuiper Belt ahead of a New Horizons 2019 flyby.
The Standard Model explains all the particles and interactions we see. But it can’t explain this. Of all the particles that we know of, the elusive neutrino is by far the […]
In the search for fundamental truths in our Universe, one of the biggest questions, “are space and time continuous or discrete,” remains unanswered. Throughout the history of science, one of […]
Among the general public, people compare it to the aether, phlogiston, or epicycles. Yet almost all astronomers are certain: dark matter and dark energy exist. Here’s why. If you go by […]
If we know how big the observable Universe is, why can’t we figure out how big the unobservable part is? 13.8 billion years ago, the Big Bang occurred. The Universe was […]
As individuals, we scientists are all flawed. But the enterprise of science rises above our individual shortcomings. The enterprise of science is perhaps the greatest achievement in all of human […]
There have been some interesting “sightings” in the news these days.
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If nothing can escape from beneath the event horizon, where do these phenomena come from? The most important feature of a black hole is that it has an event horizon: a […]
The solar neighborhood is so different than people imagine. But for the first time, we know what it’s like. When you look up at the stars in the night sky, they […]
The ‘big event’ was billed as a first in 150 years. But is what we’re seeing really that rare? This January 31st, something quite rare and special will happen. At 1:30 […]
Sometimes, you look in a nearby galaxy, and what you find beyond it will change everything. Einstein’s theory of General Relativity has withstood every test for more than a century. […]
But is this really a problem for the theory? Or is it physics to the rescue? Dark matter is one of the most powerful, yet one of the most controversial, ideas […]
The launch of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy was widely covered by the media, but one astrophotographer wanted a different kind of shot of the Tesla Roadster tumbling through space.
For every planet that orbits a star like our own, there are likely thousands of ‘orphan planets’ wandering the galaxy alone. Here in the Solar System, we can watch our star’s […]
How ‘special’ are we for life to have survived and thrived the way it did? While there are hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy, many with Earth-sized planets at […]
From the most beautiful to the most impactful, some of these are so powerful it’s breathtaking. “Truth in science, however, is never final, and what is accepted as a fact […]
Distances in the expanding Universe don’t work like you’d expect. Unless, that is, you learn to think like a cosmologist. There are a few fundamental facts about the Universe — its origin, […]
In 2016, Facebook employees were just 33% female and 2% black; YouTube employees were 30% women and 2% black; Apple employees were 32% women and 9% black; Google employees were 31% women and 2% black.
Aiming for the nearest star would necessitate a whole slew of advances. Even if the mission fails, humanity wins by investing in itself. There have been some magnificent moments in NASA […]
With a total of 10 black holes detected, what we’ve learned about the Universe is truly amazing. On September 14th, 2015, just days after LIGO first turned on at its new-and-improved […]
Kansas has launched such an ambitious educational project that public officials are likening it to the NASA moon missions of the 1960s.
It took the Universe 9.2 billion years to create the Earth, and another 4 billion for complex life. Could we have gotten there faster? The story of how the Universe came […]
March 6 marked the 50th successful launch of SpaceX’s Falcon 9, which the company plans to soon use to send humans into space.