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 […]

On May 9, 2016, the prior transit of Mercury occurred, and was photographed many times on a practically continuous basis by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. Transits of Mercury are rare, […]

A theoretical view of a distant world so far from our Sun that our Solar System appears barely brighter than the remaining stars in the sky. ( Caltech/R. Hurt (IPAC)) Pluto […]

It might seem puzzling, in a Universe bound by the speed of light, that this could be true. Here’s the science behind it. If you look out into the distant Universe, […]

Scientists actively researching this have known the answer for quite some time. It’s time for everyone to catch up. The Big Bang happened 13.8 billion years ago, and is generally regarded […]

There are a lot of unsolved mysteries in the Universe, but dark energy is the most confusing. Here’s why. The majority of the energy in our Universe went completely undiscovered until […]

Young galaxies are bright and blue; old galaxies are red and dead. So how did this old, red galaxy form so early? The observable Universe contains two trillion distinct galaxies, but […]

Forget about alien nonsense. The Universe as it actually is doesn’t need any embellishments to be interesting. In our Solar System, the planets, moons, asteroids, comets and other masses are […]

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 […]

Our Universe is 13.8 billion years old, and our Sun formed about 2/3rds of the way through. Here’s what came before it. When it comes to the great cosmic question of […]

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 […]

If this newfound galaxy is just the tip of the iceberg, the entire Universe may fall into place. One of the greatest challenges for a scientist is that every time you […]

The origin story for our Universe got a major revision nearly 40 years ago. Time to catch up. 13.8 billion years ago, all the matter and energy contained within our Universe […]

It’s one of cosmology’s biggest unsolved mysteries. The strongest argument against it may have just evaporated. The ultimate goal of cosmology contains the greatest ambition of any scientific field: to […]

Simply getting into grad school isn’t enough. The answers to these three questions can make all the difference. It’s time. You’ve done all your research into schools, completed your undergraduate […]

If you think that the Moon is only good for reflecting sunlight, you’ve got another think coming. To human eyes, the Moon is the second brightest visible object, trailing only the […]

It’s much more complex a question than dividing its mass by the volume of the event horizon. If you want to get a meaningful answer, you have to go deep. If […]

Or, quite possibly, is it more complex than either one of those scenarios? If there’s one lesson that humanity should have learned from the 20th century, it’s this: the Universe […]

Jim Peebles, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz just won the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics. It couldn’t be more well-deserved. Every year, the Nobel Prize reminds all of humanity to […]

A recent headline claimed they could. But if gamma-rays are just a form of light, don’t they have to travel at light-speed? There’s an ultimate speed limit in the Universe: […]

We know a lot about what else is out there, but we still don’t know everything. In the quest for life in the Universe, it makes sense to look at […]

There’s so much we don’t know about fast radio bursts and galactic halos. Combined, we get a unique window on the Universe. Deep in space, mysterious signals known as Fast […]

Every object in the Universe is constrained by the laws of physics. Does this mean there are any black holes that shouldn’t exist? When it comes to the objects that […]

If you thought the Planck satellite just made temperature maps of the cosmic microwave background, this will astound you. The Milky Way, to human eyes, appears as simply a mix of […]

Maybe, but that probably doesn’t mean what you think it does. Of all the unsolved puzzles in the Universe, perhaps the most confounding is the dark matter problem. If we look […]

The Sudbury neutrino observatory, which was instrumental in demonstrating neutrino oscillations and the massiveness of neutrinos. With additional results from atmospheric, solar, and terrestrial observatories and experiments, we may not […]

It’s a great scientific opportunity of modern times, but we won’t get there with our current observatories. One of the holy grails of modern science is to find a world, […]

As more data comes in, the puzzle gets deeper and deeper. Whenever you set out to solve a problem, there are a series of steps you have to take in order […]

What’s more massive than the heaviest known neutron star but lighter than the lightest known black hole? LIGO may be about to solve that mystery. Whenever a star is born in […]

You’ve seen a black hole’s event horizon for the first time thanks to them. But they’re only getting started. Earlier this year, 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration revealed the first […]