A special isotope of plutonium is necessary for missions to Mars and beyond. But we don’t have enough, and aren’t making more fast enough. As 2018 comes to a close, NASA […]
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Scientists at NASA are currently developing methane-creating robots to overcome this challenge.
With thousands of discovered planets around stars beyond our own Sun, why haven’t we found the next Earth? Over the past 30 years, astronomers have gone from zero known extra-solar planets […]
The solar eclipse of May 29, 1919, was the nail in the coffin of a Newtonian Universe. On May 29, 1919, the world changed forever. For hundreds of years, Isaac […]
It’s found everywhere we know how to look, and just might be nature’s perfect fuel. Here’s how to harness it. Dark matter is one of the biggest mysteries in all of […]
A year ago, a puzzling gap existed between black holes and neutron stars. With nearly a year of new data, LIGO solves the puzzle. On Monday, March 16, 2020, astrophysicist Carl […]
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 […]
She may not be ours forever.
It’s been spectacularly confirmed by observation, but theoretically, it couldn’t have been any other way. If the Sun were to spontaneously cease emitting light, we wouldn’t know about it for about […]
We’ve never seen an image of a black hole’s event horizon before. Here’s what we’re expecting, based on what we already know. For hundreds of years, physicists have hypothesized that the […]
While nothing is ever certain about the future, here are 10 great achievements you can bet on. Every year, unexpected scientific discoveries challenge what we know. Observations using the Atacama Large […]
A 1060-hour amateur exposure of a nearby galaxy does what even Hubble couldn’t do. The Universe is full of astronomical wonders, but it’s up to humanity to observe and analyze them. […]
The Geminid meteor shower grows more intense with every year, and it’s expected to be particularly bright in 2018.
With an assist from Einstein’s gravity and the power of the Hubble Space Telescope, it’s the brightest quasar we’ve ever discovered. In astronomy, there are two types of questions to […]
In 2017, we saw gravitational waves a neutron star merger for the first and only time. And it keeps getting more interesting. On August 17, 2017, a cosmic signal arrived […]
“It’s just a joke,” right?
The Boomerang Nebula, in our galaxy, is even colder than completely empty space. Here’s how that’s possible. Imagine the coldest place you possibly can. Inside it, the particles that make […]
In the mid-20th century, ‘physical cosmology’ was considered an oxymoronic joke. Today, it’s Nobel-winning science. Imagine you wanted to know everything you could about the Universe. You’d want to find […]
When we split something into its most fundamental, indivisible components, are we truly seeing something that’s point-like, or is there a finite minimum size? Imagine that you wanted to know what […]
Hubble captures the afterglow of an epochal blast.
Follow along as the InSight spacecraft crosses millions of miles to the red planet.
NASA research finds a new direction in searching for signs of life in the Universe.
China’s Chang’e 4 biosphere experiment marks a first for humankind.
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 […]
Only 8 worlds make the astronomical cut as planets. Here are the 10 fascinating bodies that didn’t make it. Astronomically, bodies within the Solar System must achieve three criteria in order […]
Few scientific ideas have been as polarizing as string theory. There are good reasons to both love it and hate it. String theory is perhaps the most controversial big idea in […]
Ryan O’Neal’s latest addition to his Astronomy series is a tribute to the dying spacecraft.
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A recent test shows SpaceX’s Raptor engine is powerful enough to lift Starship and Super Heavy into space.
Our outer Solar System, from Jupiter to Neptune, isn’t unique after all. In the early 1990s, scientists began detecting the first planets orbiting stars other than the Sun: exoplanets. The easiest […]
You’d have to throw out a lot of known physics for this to even be a possibility. Here’s why. It’s an undeniable scientific fact that dark matter must exist in order […]