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Astrophysics
We speak with cosmologist Dan Hooper, and ponder the literal edge of what we know about the Universe. Have you ever wondered what the first moments of our Universe were […]
How can physics on the smallest scales affect what the Universe does on its largest ones? Cosmic inflation holds the answer. On a macroscopic level, the Universe appears to be entirely […]
The quest for the ultimate vacuum just got taken to the next level thanks to a new technique: the quantum squeezer. One of the most understated frontiers in all of […]
If this discovery came in a pre-LIGO era, maybe it would have been a surprise. But in 2019, there’s no mystery at all. Did you hear that astronomers had recently […]
In science, breakthroughs don’t always begin with a ‘eureka’ moment. Sometimes, the true story is absolutely unbelievable. When it comes to our Universe’s origin story, many competing ideas once thrived. […]
Without this one ingredient, there wouldn’t be enough ‘glue’ to hold the Universe together. Of all the things in the Universe to be thankful for — the stars, planets, atoms, molecules, and […]
The shape of our Universe has long been recognized to be flat. But that isn’t the only possibility. The Universe is expanding, and goes on for farther than even our […]
The Leonid meteor shower peaks today. Its parent comet taught us where meteor showers come from. Every year, as Earth regularly orbits the Sun, meteor showers repeatedly recur. While August’s Perseids […]
Even before MMA was a combat sport, it was a unique type of astronomy. Today, it’s opening up the Universe as never before. On February 24, 1987, a spectacular signal was […]
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 […]