Catch Saturn at its biggest and brightest, and view its rings while you still can. Right now, in Earth’s skies, Saturn appears at its biggest and brightest. A view of tonight’s […]
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And if you have a friend at the same longitude, you can even measure its circumference. This year’s equinox, on March 19/20 of 2020 (longitude-dependent), is Earth’s earliest in 124 […]
There were at least four major climate catastrophes that reshaped global religion. It could be happening again.
One look at the uncertainties and the assumptions changes the story tremendously. Is there intelligent life out there in the Milky Way beyond our own Solar System? If so, how […]
A Mercury-bound spacecraft’s noisy flyby of our home planet.
When we try to recreate simpler versions of natural ecosystems, we invariably make mistakes, argues author and biologist Rob Dunn.
At 35 light-years away, it’s also the 2nd coolest, 2nd widest planet ever found. Despite discovering more than 4000 exoplanets, most remain obscure. Although more than 4,000 confirmed exoplanets are known, […]
Is it groupthink? Or is there a deeper reason? In the early half of the 20th century, even after the discovery of the expanding Universe, physicists considered a wide variety of […]
They’re one of the brightest windows into our Universe’s star-forming past. When we look out at the galaxies in the Universe, almost all of them have supermassive black holes at […]
Cosmic rays aren’t just limited by the speed of light. Even among non-scientists, it’s well-understood that there’s an ultimate speed limit to the Universe: the speed of light. If you’re a […]
If a large asteroid strikes Earth, it has the potential to release an enormous amount of energy, leading to local or even global catastrophes. The strike that led to the […]
The strongest tests of curved space are only possible around the lowest-mass black holes of all. One of the most mind-bending concepts about the Universe itself is that gravity isn’t due […]
The trans-Tasman and Pacific bubbles will likely be among the first safe international travel zones in the world.
Scientists should be cautious when expressing an opinion based on little more than speculation.
The newest record-setting quasar houses an enormous black hole. No one knows how. In every scientific field, we’re always on the lookout for whatever new discovery might reveal what’s currently beyond […]
The Big Bang is our accepted origin of the Universe. But is there another possibility? Since the mid-1960s and the discovery of the Cosmic Microwave Background, the Big Bang has […]
Can this end flat-Earth theory once and for all?
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Observing the great gas giant helps me to keep important things in perspective.
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Halley’s comet only visits every ~76 years, but its meteors arrive twice each year. The most famous comet of all — Halley’s comet — returns to our inner Solar System every ~76 years. Halley’s comet […]
Even 13.8 billion years after the Big Bang, we can reconstruct the first 3 minutes. About 100 years ago, we began to truly understand the nature of the Universe for the […]
Known as the ‘North Star,’ Polaris won’t stay that way forever. Planet Earth spins a full 360°, about its axis, every 24 hours. The Earth in orbit around the Sun, with […]
Astronomers propose new estimate of Earth-like planets in the Milky Way galaxy.
Out of all the galaxies we know, only a few little ones are missing dark matter. At last, we finally understand why.
Our galactic home in the cosmos — the Milky Way — is only one of two trillion galaxies in the observable Universe. Our galactic home in the cosmos — the Milky Way — is merely one among the […]
The ten greatest ideas in science form the bedrock of modern biology, chemistry, and physics. Everyone should be familiar with them.
From galaxies with no dark matter to ones with hundreds of times more dark matter than normal, our Universe needs it more than ever. One of the most mysterious substances in […]
“Nothing but naked people: fat ones, thin ones, old, young…”
Although many dinosaurs never left the ground, they still possessed the basic structural framework for flight.
How does one supernova get so bright, so energetic, and so massive? It’s a spectacular mystery to solve. On February 22, 2016, one of humanity’s automated sky-scanning telescopes — the Pan-STARRS Survey for […]
A strange weakness in the Earth’s protective magnetic field is growing and possibly splitting, shows data.