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Cosmology
If you accept cosmic inflation and quantum physics, there’s no way out. The Multiverse is real. Look out at the Universe all you want, with arbitrarily powerful technology, and you’ll never […]
Yes, life exists in our Universe. No, that statement doesn’t equal science. Imagine you’ve encountered a natural phenomenon you want to understand better, but don’t have the tools to do so. […]
While the web of dark matter (purple) might seem to determine cosmic structure formation on its own, the feedback from normal matter (red) can severely impact galactic scales. Both dark […]
The ‘giant impact’ that led to Earth might not have been so giant, after all. A little over 4.5 billion years ago, our Solar System began to form. Somewhere in the […]
As more time passes since the Big Bang, more of the Universe comes into view. But how much? Even though it’s been billions of years since the Big Bang, there’s a […]
Gravity gets weaker as the distance squared. But gravitational waves only get weaker as the distance. Why? One of the things we often just accept about the world is that […]
Before we formed stars, atoms, elements, or even got rid of our antimatter, the Big Bang made neutrinos. And we found them. The idea of the Big Bang has captivated the […]
What happened 4.56 billion years ago is the most important part of the cosmic story ever to happen to us. If you were to look at our Universe at the time […]
But we shouldn’t give up on direct detection. Here’s why. Dark matter is not only the most abundant form of matter in the Universe, it’s also the most mysterious. Whereas all […]
In 2017, we saw gravitational waves a neutron star merger for the first and only time. And it keeps getting more interesting. On August 17, 2017, a cosmic signal arrived […]
For billions of years, dark energy couldn’t have been detected. Now, it’s everywhere we look. When we look out at the ultra-distant Universe, billion of light-years away, we’re seeing it as […]
We can see light from the atoms in the Universe before the first stars form. And no, I don’t mean from the CMB! After the Big Bang, it took only a […]
From billions of miles away, a faint, single pixel shows us how precious and alone Earth truly is. There are people alive today who can remember a time where no human-made […]
The heaviest elements in the periodic table have their own unique story. No, they don’t come from a supernova. When it comes to the elements of the Universe, every one […]
We know that life is possible on an Earth-like world around a Sun-like star. But can it find a way on a Super-Earth? When it comes to the origin of […]
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 […]
When two different techniques give two different results, either someone is wrong, or something incredible is happening. Imagine you were a scientist attempting to measure some property of the Universe. […]
A new study claims that dark energy is changing with time. Here’s what it would mean, if true. For the past generation, we’ve recognized that our Universe is a particularly dark […]
Only 8 worlds make the astronomical cut as planets. Here are the 10 fascinating bodies that didn’t make it. Astronomically, bodies within the Solar System must achieve three criteria in order […]
We’d never flown past or imaged a small, isolated Kuiper belt object before. Here’s what we know so far. As 2018 ended and 2019 began, NASA’s New Horizons flew past its […]
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 […]
The ability to instantaneously jump from one location in space to another clearly violates the laws of physics. Or does it? There are a few rules in the Universe that seem […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
If you think you have problems today, be glad you’re not moving at the speed of light. Special relativity, even though it’s over 100 years old, is still one of the […]