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Astrophysics
Yes, "the laws of physics break down" at singularities. But relativity itself would have to be wrong for black holes to not possess them.
In 2016, humanity announced our first successful gravitational wave detection. 10 years and 389 events later, here's how far we've come.
Many people, now with LLM assistance, regularly claim to discover game-changing revolutions. Scientists don't buy it. You shouldn't either.
The original idea of the Big Bang was synonymous with a singularity: a point of zero volume. In this Universe, things never got that small.
Astronomers study our cosmic history through stellar and galactic archaeology. But we can't conduct archaeology in space. At least, not yet.
Today, in the here-and-now, a full 13.8 billion years have elapsed since the start of the hot Big Bang. But would that be true for everyone?
In physics, we reduce things to their elementary, fundamental components, and build emergent things out of them. That's not the full story.
Messier 77 is one of the largest nearby spiral galaxies, with an active, brilliant core. Here's what JWST's incomparable eyes saw inside it.
A relatively tiny world in the Kuiper belt, just 500 km in diameter, has an atmosphere after all, joining Pluto. Here's what we know today.
There's a lot of room in interplanetary, interstellar, and intergalactic space, but just how low the densities go is truly mind-boggling.
Contrary to common experience, not everything needs a medium to travel through. Overcoming that assumption removes the need for an aether.
In 2006, the IAU defined "planet" for the first time, excluding Pluto and all other dwarf planets. In 2026, is it now time for a change?
From within our own galaxy to behemoths billions of light-years away, supermassive black holes create jets like nothing else in the cosmos.
In 2006, Pluto was controversially demoted to "dwarf planet" by the IAU. Unless you ignore most of astrophysics, it won't ever be one again.
The first colliding galaxy cluster to reveal dark matter, empirically, turns 20 this year. Here's why it cements dark matter's existence.
Many facts are well-known to professionals, but are unappreciated or even rejected outright by the public. "How stars work" takes the cake.
The famous framework ranks civilizations by energy use — but ignores a critical factor that can halt their progress.
On cosmic scales, only dark matter (or something equivalent) gives us the Universe we observe. Now, the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect agrees.
Although a star's "birth" is well-defined, it doesn't correspond to an ignition event in its core. Here's how stars are actually born.
One parameter, alone, sets the dividing line between rocky planets, gas giants, brown dwarfs, stars, and much more. Here's why mass matters.
By looking at a giant, remarkable, edge-on protoplanetary system, astronomers have found a proto-protoplanet for the first time.
Human beings have now traveled farther from Earth than ever before with Artemis II's flyby of the lunar far side. Here's how it happened.
Known as the "past hypothesis" problem, the Universe's initially low entropy has long puzzled scientists. Now, cosmic inflation solves it.
The 1st generation of stars formed, lived, and died very early on. But 2nd generation stars could still persist today. Did we just find one?
As humanity journeys to the Moon for the first time since 1972, can we rediscover our shared responsibilities: to the world and each other?
As light travels across the Universe, it's subject to cosmic expansion, changing fields, and relative motion. How about gravitational waves?
Even though no human has stepped foot on the Moon's surface in 50 years, the evidence of our presence there remains unambiguous.
In a 13.8 billion year old Universe, a few seconds hardly seems like it matters. But these minuscule changes sure do add up over time.
Most massive galaxies are spiral or elliptical shaped. But peculiar galaxies showcase the beautiful violence that helps explain our cosmos.
Early on, the Universe needed near-perfect flatness, or atoms, stars, and galaxies couldn't form. What happens once dark energy takes over?