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Astrophysics
Our Universe is full of surprises. This latest one, AT2018cow, has ignited a controversy between astronomers. The Universe is an ever-changing place, particularly if you look at it on long-enough […]
A rare, ultra-diffuse galaxy is full of stars and not much else. Here’s how to make sense of it. One of the greatest puzzles in the entire Universe is the dark […]
With a new data run coming in 2019 at unprecedented sensitivity, we might finally get our answers. Over the past three years, LIGO discovered ten independent instances of merging black holes […]
With an assist from Einstein’s gravity and the power of the Hubble Space Telescope, it’s the brightest quasar we’ve ever discovered. In astronomy, there are two types of questions to […]
Kepler showed us that the Universe is full of planets around other stars. TESS is giving us our next great leap. It’s been nearly a decade since NASA’s Kepler mission first […]
This is what we’ve learned from first object ever discovered to enter our Solar System from interstellar space. Billions of years ago, our Solar System was an extraordinarily different place […]
On January 20/21, half of Earth will experience a total lunar eclipse. For the first time in 19 years, this includes all of North and South America. When the Sun, Earth, […]
The 40th edition of the Starts With A Bang Podcast features Astronomer John O’Meara, the first pristine matter ever seen, and a 15-meter space telescope proposal! One of the great […]
We can explore the farthest reaches of the Universe, but can’t even complete our own cosmic backyard. The history of astronomy has been a history of receding horizons. The invention […]
The reason why is simple, and should apply to every solar system like our own. On January 3rd, 2019, Earth reached the point in its orbit where it’s at its closest […]
If you photograph the Sun at the same time every day, you get a bizarre figure-8 shape: an analemma. Here’s why. At any time of day, you could theoretically set up […]
When two black holes merge together, about 5% of their mass gets lost. Where does that information go? Do merging black holes lose information? They absolutely must, according to General […]
Sometimes, the biggest answers to the deepest questions come in the most unexpected of places. In the Solar System, anything out past Neptune is generally considered to be the outer reaches […]
Dark matter is one of the most puzzling, unintuitive concepts in all of physics. But we still need it. Our Universe isn’t like us. While we’re made of atoms, and other […]
Despite being 28 years old and having a gyroscope failure, Hubble still delivered these 10 amazing snapshots in 2018. Year after year since its 1990 launch, Hubble keeps revolutionizing our view […]
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 […]
The Universe began almost perfectly uniform, while today, it’s anything but. Here’s how we grew up. One of the strangest facts about the Universe is how dramatically its changed over time. […]
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 […]
Have you ever wanted to: see the southern skies? visit the best resort on the South American continent? explore the Atacama desert? see the world’s most powerful radio telescope array? […]
It will be the most extreme test of Einstein’s General Relativity ever. And we already have the data. With every year that goes by, the total amount of knowledge that humanity […]
With thousands of discovered planets around stars beyond our own Sun, why haven’t we found the next Earth? Over the past 30 years, astronomers have gone from zero known extra-solar planets […]
The expanding Universe really is accelerating, and no dusty scenario can explain it. 20 years ago, our understanding of the Universe underwent a revolution. For generations, we had known the Universe […]
With a total of 10 black holes detected, what we’ve learned about the Universe is truly amazing. On September 14th, 2015, just days after LIGO first turned on at its new-and-improved […]
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 […]
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 […]
All the planets, asteroids, and Kuiper belt objects out there all point to the same conclusion: it’s giant impacts or no moons at all. Out of all the rocky planets […]
Galaxies are found uniformly everywhere in the Universe, except in the Milky Way’s plane. Here’s why. From the time of their very first discovery, the Universe’s grand spirals have puzzled astronomers. […]
If particles weren’t also waves, the Sun would never achieve nuclear fusion. Without quantum mechanics, life on Earth would never have come to exist. The greatest source of newly-produced energy in […]
The first identified visitor from another solar system gets its own Starts With A Bang podcast! In 2017, the incredible happened: for the first time in history, we were able to […]
For more than 10 billion years, the star-formation rate across the Universe has been plummeting. Here’s the story. Take a look at a wide variety of galaxies in the Universe, and […]