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Cosmology
Just because something’s unlikely doesn’t mean that anything’s wrong. In our quest to understand the Universe, theoretical physics is perhaps the most powerful tool we have as far as making […]
The Big Bang started it all. And then we realized there was more. Of all the questions humanity has ever pondered, perhaps the most profound is, “where did all of this […]
It likely isn’t the rare occurrence we once thought it was. In our Solar System, there’s one overwhelming source of mass that all the planets orbit around: our Sun. Each planet […]
It’s fundamentally different from space. Here’s how. Here’s a question that most of us have been asked at some point in our lives, “what’s the shortest distance between two points?” By […]
When one group says “A” and another group says “B,” consider that everyone might be wrong. One of the biggest enemies of scientific truth is the setup of a false dichotomy. […]
They’re one of the brightest windows into our Universe’s star-forming past. When we look out at the galaxies in the Universe, almost all of them have supermassive black holes at […]
As the Universe ages, will it eventually fade away entirely? The earliest signal we’ve ever directly detected from the Universe comes to us from shortly after the Big Bang: when […]
Everything is being driven apart. But there’s hope of reaching what’s currently so far away. For the first 7.8 billion years, the Universe unfolded exactly as scientists would have expected in […]
It comes from a supernova seen just 33 years ago, and it doesn’t pulse. 33 years ago, a supernova occurred just 168,000 light-years from Earth. This new image of the supernova […]
Some of them may have formed just 200 million years after the Big Bang. When we look out at the Universe, we’re not seeing objects as they are today, but rather […]
How can we save humanity from ourselves? In this life and this Universe, there will always be questions beyond the capabilities of humanity to answer. There’s so much that we’ve […]
The history of the Universe is forever imprinted in our own bodies. We can learn a lot about the history of the Universe just by looking at each of our own […]
There’s a boundary to how far back we can observe everything that exists. Despite everything we’ve learned about our Universe, there are many existential questions that remain unanswered. We don’t know […]
How quickly is it expanding today, and how does that expansion rate change over time? What is the Universe made of? How quickly is it expanding today, and how does that […]
Our galactic home in the cosmos — the Milky Way — is only one of two trillion galaxies in the observable Universe. Our galactic home in the cosmos — the Milky Way — is merely one among the […]
Without quantum physics, the Sun wouldn’t shine at all. Earth, as we know it, is only teeming with life because of the influence of our Sun. Its light and heat provides […]
5 years ago, LIGO detected our first gravitational waves here on Earth. Next decade, LISA will start seeing them from space. When it comes to gravitational waves, our terrestrial laser interferometers […]
We still don’t know how it came to be this way. Every once in a while, we find an object in the Universe that completely mystifies us. For generations, astronomers have […]
The Standard Model and General Relativity can’t be all there is. But how will we discover what lies beyond them? One of the biggest problems with physics is that, apart from […]
The theoretical reasons to expect it are compelling, but the technology required to detect it is unfathomable. All throughout our galaxy, millions of black holes of a variety of masses […]
There’s a lot left to understand, ponder, and investigate. And there always will be. For hundreds of thousands of years — nearly all of human history — we had no definitive answers to some of […]
CERN’s bold new proposal has physicists confronting the biggest question of all: is building a new collider worth it? If you want to discover anything novel about the natural, physical […]
Without a little help from Einstein, we couldn’t have made this discovery. NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, currently celebrating its 30th anniversary, still churns out novel discoveries. The Hubble eXtreme Deep […]
This year’s June solstice coincides with a new Moon and an annular solar eclipse. Here’s how rare it truly is. As the Earth orbits the Sun, it rotates on its axis. […]
One look at the uncertainties and the assumptions changes the story tremendously. Is there intelligent life out there in the Milky Way beyond our own Solar System? If so, how […]
Nothing in the Universe can travel faster than the speed of light. So how does space itself do it? One of the fundamental rules we all learn in physics — set forth by […]
Solid, liquid, and gas are the three everyone learns. Plasma is the fourth. But there are two more, and they’re fascinating. How many states of matter are there? When you […]
In 2011, a bizarre, green object was discovered. At long last, we finally understand why. One of astronomy’s biggest surprises came in 2007, when a mysterious green object was found. […]
We’re looking back farther in time than ever before. Here’s what we’re finding. Even today, the Universe is forming enormous numbers of new stars: from various nebulae throughout our galaxy to […]
It happened 13.8 billion years ago, so why hasn’t the radiation all passed over us by now? For the past 13.8 billion years, our Universe has been expanding, cooling, and gravitating. […]