Our own galaxy, the Milky Way, is both completely normal and absolutely remarkable in a number of ways. Here’s the story of our cosmic home.
Search Results
You searched for: sun
There’s a quantum limit to how precisely anything can be measured. By squeezing light, LIGO has now surpassed all previous limitations.
Passing chunks of ice can fertilize ocean waters and play a role in the planet’s carbon cycle.
There are many theories of gravity out there, and many interpretations of wide binary star data. What have we really learned from it all?
The evidence that the Universe is expanding is overwhelming. But how? By stretching the existing space, or by creating new space itself?
To the Greek philosopher, all of our actions ultimately aim at our own pleasure.
All of the matter and radiation we measure today originated in a hot Big Bang long ago. The Universe was never empty, not even before that.
From the Big Bang to black holes, singularities are hard to avoid. The math definitely predicts them, but are they truly, physically real?
The Sun produces a wide variety of particles and radiation throughout it, but all of its neutrinos are produced in the core: where nuclear reactions take place. The various reactions […]
Archaeologists turn to other scientific fields to fill in the picture of how victims lived and why they died.
In the largest star-forming region close to Earth, JWST found hundreds of planetary-mass objects. How do these free-floating planets form?
Such massive, early supermassive black holes have puzzled astronomers for decades. At last, we’ve finally figured out how they form.
And either way, is energy or information conserved? When two things in the Universe that “always” occur meet one another, how do you know which one will win? Gravitational waves, […]
More than two years after JWST began science operations, our Universe now looks very different. Here are its biggest science contributions.
If you’re a massless particle, you must always move at light speed. If you have mass, you must go slower. So why aren’t any neutrinos slow?
The last image puts it all in perspective. Compared to what we find in our Solar System, galaxies are truly enormous. The Sun may be 109 times the diameter of […]
Some artifacts drown in shipwrecks, others are taken by the tide. Many others will vanish as a result of climate change and rising sea levels.
Despite Betelgeuse’s recent faintening and brightening, I’d bet on these stars instead. Betelgeuse, a nearby red supergiant, will someday explode. The black hole at the center of the Milky Way should […]
Some fascinating observations of K2-18b have come along with horrendous, speculative communications. There’s no evidence for oceans or life.
The conservation of energy is one of the most fundamental laws governing our reality. But in the expanding Universe, that’s just not true.
Ancient helium-3 from the dawn of time leaks from the Earth, offering clues to our planet’s formation. A key question is where it leaks from.
On July 4, we celebrate the tenth anniversary of the discovery of the Higgs boson, the missing piece of the Standard Model of particle physics.
Shortly after planet Earth formed, life took a permanent hold on our surface. But just how common is such an outcome?
With radio and X-ray data combined, we’re understanding how energy flows like never before. When we look out at the Universe on the largest cosmic scales of all, gravity is the […]
“The pulsar sort of consumes the thing that recycled it, just as the spider eats its mate.”
Ground-based facilities enable the greatest scientific production in all of astronomy. The NSF needs to be ambitious, and it’s now or never.
The Universe’s idea of a ‘typical star’ has changed dramatically over time. When you look out at the Universe today, you’re not seeing it exactly as it is at one particular […]
The 72-meter wingspan is lined with solar panels to give the plane the power it needs to stay airborne for nearly three months.
In physics, we reduce things to their elementary, fundamental components, and build emergent things out of them. That’s not the full story.