If we were in a place like the Coma Cluster instead of the Local Group, we’d already be dead. In a living spiral galaxy, like the Milky Way, the rich gas […]

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 […]

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 […]

While nothing is ever certain about the future, here are 10 great achievements you can bet on. Every year, unexpected scientific discoveries challenge what we know. Observations using the Atacama Large […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 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 […]

Despite what Hawking told you, it really isn’t about particle-antiparticle pairs at all. Nothing in the Universe lives forever. All the stars that will ever form will someday burn out; distant […]

Your fate is only rarely determined at birth. Ultimately, every star has a chance to get there. Three times in the past 1,000 years, a portion of humanity has looked up […]

These ten ghostly astronomical sights house some deep-and-frightening scientific truths within them. With a huge suite of different observatories for viewing the Universe, innumerable details can be revealed. This ‘Godzilla’ asterism […]

No matter what Martin Rees or anyone else says, physics dictates that the world is safe. The Large Hadron Collider is the world’s most powerful particle accelerator. An aerial view of […]

It was Stephen Hawking’s obsession for the last 30 years of his life. Here’s why it matters. When it comes to the sciences, sometimes making two observations or measurements that appear […]

As the Event Horizon Telescope prepares to release its first results, we can expect not just one, but two black hole images. What does a black hole actually look like? For […]

The Big Bang happened everywhere at once, but stars are a different story. The Universe, back at its inception, was almost perfectly identical everywhere. It was the same high temperature […]

For 100 million years, there was only creation in the Universe. Meet our first moments of destruction. The cosmic story that gave rise to us is a story rife with […]

The most massive star in the known Universe is 260 times as heavy as our Sun. But viewing the early Universe will shatter that record. Place enough mass together in one […]

Space may be enormous, but collisions are inevitable. Here’s what happens when they occur. The Universe as we know it has been around for nearly 14 billion years: plenty of time […]

In 1987, we detected neutrinos from another galaxy in a supernova. After a 30 year wait, we’ve found something even better. One of the great mysteries in science is determining not […]

The brightest galaxies of all neither have the most stars nor the biggest black holes. Here’s how to solve the mystery. With some 400 billion stars burning steadily, the Milky Way […]

Forget the spectacular explosions we create here on Earth. The Universe outdoes us in every way imaginable. Forget mere chemical reactions; in space, matter-energy conversion creates unprecedentedly powerful explosive events. […]

If you thought LIGO’s recent discoveries were profound and unusual, wait until you meet OJ 287. Recently, LIGO has revolutionized our knowledge of the Universe by discovering merging black holes. The […]

As the new Star Wars movie, Solo, premieres, let’s look at the physics of how his most famous achievement might actually be possible. The Millennium Falcon’s greatest achievement, according to […]

The solar neighborhood is so different than people imagine. But for the first time, we know what it’s like. When you look up at the stars in the night sky, they […]

We see matter, but not antimatter, in our Universe. Could black holes be the answer? One of the greatest cosmic puzzles in our entire Universe is why there’s so much more […]

In the far future, the last star burns out, stellar corpses get violently ejected, and galaxies accelerate away. And then the fun begins. For centuries, the biggest questions about our Universe […]

The paradox is one that Hawking himself claimed to have a solution to many times, but none of the proposals have held up to scrutiny. The paradox is still unresolved. […]