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Astrophysics
Across planet Earth, dark and pristine night skies are an increasingly rare resource. These photos showcase the best of what we still have.
The Universe was born incredibly hot, and has expanded and cooled ever since. Could life have begun back when space was "room temperature?"
Just 13.8 billion years after the hot Big Bang, we can see 46.1 billion light-years away in all directions. Doesn't that violate...something?
Einstein is credited with saying, "If the facts don't fit the theory, change the facts." What he actually said has a very different meaning.
At the center of Hubble's famous "cosmic horseshoe," a very heavy supermassive black hole has been robustly measured. How is it possible?
In the search for life in the Universe, the ultimate goal is to find an inhabited planet beyond Earth. How will we know when we've made it?
Parallel universes are among the most profound notions in all of quantum physics. It's a compelling and fascinating idea, but is it true?
There are real concerns with long-term power generation on the Moon; nuclear could be the answer. But for NASA, will the cost be too high?
At the end of July, hundreds of scientists convened to plan NASA's upcoming astrophysics flagship mission. Will the US allow it to happen?
Two supermassive black holes on an inevitable death spiral push the limits of Einstein's relativity. New observations reveal even more.
When it comes to our Universe's origins, scientists discuss the Big Bang, cosmic inflation, and other theories. Why doesn't "God" come up?
On the largest scales, galaxies don't simply clump together, but form superclusters. Too bad they don't remain bound together.
The conversation you're having with an LLM about groundbreaking new ideas in theoretical physics is completely meritless. Here's why.
Somewhere, at some point in the history of our Universe, life arose. We're evidence of that here on Earth, but many big puzzles remain.
Even just by examining the Moon with the unaided eye, we can learn an incredible amount about the Moon, Earth, and more.
The Big Bang was hot, dense, uniform, and filled with matter and energy. Before that? There was nothing. Here's how that's possible.
When the Hubble Space Telescope first launched in 1990, there was so much we didn't know. Here's how far we've come.
Once you cross a black hole's event horizon, there's no going back. But inside, could creating a singularity give birth to a new Universe?
From high school through the professional ranks, physicists still take incredible lessons away from Newton's second law.
No matter what it is that we discover about reality, the fact that reality itself can be understood remains the most amazing fact of all.
With over 300 high-significance gravitational wave detections, we now have a huge unsolved puzzle. Will we invest in finding the solution?
Will we build a successor collider to the LHC? Someday, we'll reach the true limit of what experiments can probe. But that won't be the end.
1hr 18mins
“Could black holes be the key to a quantum theory of gravity, a deeper theory of how reality, of how space and time works?”
The measured value of the cosmological constant is 120 orders of magnitude smaller than what's predicted. How can this paradox be resolved?
65 million years ago, a massive asteroid struck Earth. Not only did Jupiter not stop it, but it most likely caused the impact itself.
First 'Oumuamua, then Borisov, and now ATLAS have shown us that interstellar interlopers are real. Here's what the newest one teaches us.
Our nearby Ring Nebula, with JWST's eyes, shows evidence for planet formation. Will the Sun eventually destroy, and then replace, the Earth?
The relic signal that first proved the Big Bang has been known and analyzed for 60 years. Join us at the frontiers of modern cosmology!
The CMB has long been considered the Big Bang's "smoking gun" evidence. But after what JWST saw, might it come from early galaxies instead?
Once every 12 years, Earth, Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune all line up, opening a window for a joint mission. Our next chance arrives in 2034.