The farther away they get, the smaller distant galaxies look. But only up to a point, and then they get magnified. Here’s how. Intuitively, we all know that when we see […]
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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 […]
Einstein’s explanation is the only one that works. When Newton first proposed the law of universal gravitation, it marked the very first time that we realized the same rule governing how […]
The barrier to solar energy has always been storage. Now, bottled sunshine has a shelf-life of 18 years.
Michelle Thaller from NASA examines if it’s possible to put up a giant disk to block out the sun’s rays and cool Earth.
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A black hole’s event horizon is thought of as the point of no return. But perhaps there are ways back out, after all. Black holes just might be the most extreme […]
Money may not buy you love, but it won’t break your heart either.
On the eve of receiving the Templeton Prize, Marcelo Gleiser reflects on his life.
Synthetic biology is changing the way the planet works.
In all the Universe, there’s only one Earth. But can we find the other worlds that are like ours? Even though the ingredients for life have been confirmed to be practically […]
Gravity and time are so different from what you’d expect. Here’s how it all would end. If you could only know the answer to one question about the Universe, what would […]
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 […]
One often-neglected result of climate change is ocean acidification. If this process continues, we may start to see fewer fish and more jellyfish.
Your fate is only rarely determined at birth. Ultimately, every star has a chance to get there. Three times in the past 1,000 years, a portion of humanity has looked up […]
One of Stephen Hawking’s predictions seems to have been borne out in a man-made “black hole.”
In all the years of NASA, we’ve never touched the Sun before. Here’s why it’s so hard. This past weekend, NASA successfully launched the Parker Solar Probe: the first spacecraft that […]
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 […]
It may have been captured by Neptune since it formed, but Triton remains king of the Kuiper belt. Our Solar System is arguably the most well-studied corner of the Universe, with […]
TV’s shared cultural “now” moments embody the intersection of time and tech.
For generations, planet formation was only a theory. As 2018 comes to an end, here’s the evidence of what’s going on. The theory of planet formation has been around for a […]
And if the data is good enough, we can determine that it’s accelerating directly, too, silencing the last remaining doubters. If you want to understand what the Universe is made […]
The probe, no larger than a car, will be the closest a man-made object has ever gotten to the sun. We will be able to study and see it like we’ve never seen it before.
After docking at the International Space Station, the unmanned capsule executed a fiery and carefully choreographed return to Earth.
There are real problems that our society faces, and only through expert-level knowledge can we solve them. All across the country, you can see how the seeds of it develop from […]
One of the most popular viral videos about space is dead wrong. But it gives us a chance to learn something incredible. There are a lot of moving parts to […]
It’s an asteroid, it’s a comet, it’s actually a spacecraft?
If we ruin the night sky too severely, ground-based astronomy could suffer tremendously. Here’s why space is no replacement. There is an existential threat to astronomy as we know it, […]
The planet has had life on it, in some form or another, for nearly as long as Earth has existed. If you came to our Solar System right after it formed, […]
It took more than 9 billion years for Earth to form: the only known planet housing life. But it could have happened much, much sooner. The cosmic story that unfolded following […]