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Astrophysics
If you think of the Big Bang as an explosion, we can trace it back to a single point-of-origin. But what if it happened everywhere at once?
Big Think spoke with astronomer David Kipping about technosignatures, "extragalactic SETI," and being a popular science communicator in the YouTube age.
All of the matter that we measure today originated in the hot Big Bang. But even before that, and far into the future, it'll never be empty.
The hot Big Bang is often touted as the beginning of the Universe. But there's one piece of evidence we can't ignore that shows otherwise.
As we gain new knowledge, our scientific picture of how the Universe works must evolve. This is a feature of the Big Bang, not a bug.
The universe is filled with unlikely events, but it is also full of ways to fool ourselves.
Just because a paper passes peer review doesn't mean that what's written, or what the author asserts, is true. Here's why it still matters.
Questions about our origins, biologically, chemically, and cosmically, are the most profound ones we can ask. Here are today's best answers.
The fear of unleashing forces beyond control has haunted science for centuries.
Dust is ubiquitous in the modern Universe, appearing in nearly all galaxies. But our cosmos was born dust-free. So where does it originate?
It's the origin of our entire observable Universe, but it's still not the very beginning of everything.
The most common type of exoplanet is neither Earth-sized nor Neptune-sized, but in between. Could these haze-rich worlds house alien life?
In this excerpt from "Facing Infinity," Jonas Enander examines how John Michell conceived of "dark stars," or massive bodies with enough gravity to trap light, all the way back in 1783.
The Holy Grail of physics is a Theory of Everything: where a single equation describes the whole Universe. But maybe there simply isn't one?
JWST isn't the first telescope to peer into this factory of star-birth some 5500 light-years away, but its views are the most educational.
Going back to 1990, we hadn't even found one planet outside of our Solar System. As we close in on 6000, we now see many of them directly.
Since even before Einstein, physicists have sought a theory of everything to explain the Universe. Can positive geometry lead us there?
Across all wavelengths of light, the Sun is brighter than the Moon. Until we went to the highest energies and saw a gamma-ray surprise.
The Juno spacecraft, orbiting and imaging Jupiter since 2016, is still succeeding. Without a further extension, the mission now faces death.
With several seemingly incompatible observations, cosmology faces many puzzles. Could early, supermassive stars be the unified solution?
As we look to larger cosmic scales, we get a broader view of the expansive cosmic forest, eventually revealing the grandest views of all.
Explanations for the cosmic speed limit often conflate mass with inertia.
The Universe isn't just expanding; the expansion is accelerating. If different methods yield incompatible results, is dark energy evolving?
When you don't have enough clues to bring your detective story to a close, you should expect that your educated guesses will all be wrong.
10 years ago, LIGO saw its first gravitational wave. After 218 detections, our view of black holes has changed forever. Can this era endure?
Designed to map galaxies, the SPHEREx mission's first science result is instead about interstellar interloper 3I/ATLAS. No, it's not aliens.
In our own Milky Way, a recently deceased star creates a ghostly, hand-like shape in X-rays some 150 light-years wide. Here's how it's made.
Throughout history, "free energy" has been a scammer's game, such as perpetual motion. But with zero-point energy, is it actually possible?
Science helps us imagine the vastness of space and time — and our small but meaningful place within it.
NASA's 1958 charter's top priority was, "the expansion of human knowledge of phenomena in the atmosphere and space." Is this how it ends?