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 […]

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 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 […]

White dwarfs, neutron stars, and brown dwarfs aren’t actually stars at all. Here’s why. When it comes to stars, there’s a huge variety of different types out there. Our Sun is […]

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 […]

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 […]

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. […]

Here on Earth, all the right conditions occurred for intelligent life to come about, but the nearest aliens, if they’re on another world, are light years away. But it doesn’t […]

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 […]

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 […]

It isn’t just for merging neutron stars, anymore. Over the past three years, there’s arguably been no greater scientific discovery than the direct detection of gravitational waves. The two LIGO […]

They’re the fastest rotators of all. So how distorted are they? There are very few objects in the Universe that stand still; almost everything we know of rotates in some way. […]

A cosmic controversy is back, and at least one camp — perhaps both — is making an unidentified error. Ever since Hubble first discovered the relationship between a galaxy’s distance and its motion away […]

We’ve come so far since 2015; what do we know about dark matter now that we didn’t know then? Back in 2015, the dark matter situation was pretty straightforward: the large-scale […]

Just because it isn’t Thanksgiving anymore doesn’t mean we don’t have an entire Universe to be thankful for. Every day, we have a choice whether we take our lives, our existence, […]

Don’t believe in dark matter or dark energy? Your view of the Universe just got a lot more difficult. If you ask an astrophysicist what’s the greatest puzzle in the […]

For the first time, we’ve seen neutron stars merge. At last, the gravitational and electromagnetic sky are one. “It’s becoming clear that in a sense the cosmos provides the only laboratory […]

For the first time, the gravitational wave sky and the astronomical sky might be coming together. It’s a new era, at long last. “Presently thought to be the most powerful explosions […]

One of the most famous quantum physicists of all makes his mark in space, 80 years after first predicting it. “What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed […]

Sometimes, what nature gives you is even better than what you hoped for. “Science doesn’t always go forwards. It’s a bit like doing a Rubik’s cube. You sometimes have to make […]

Not faster than 299,792,458 m/s, but faster than light moves through anything other than vacuum! “You are both fools. You cannot see thoughts, or angels. One is an abstract, the other […]

There’s a big gap between Helium and Carbon. Come find out why! “And argon, krypton, neon, radon, xenon, zinc and rhodium,And chlorine, cobalt, carbon, copper, tungsten, tin and sodium.These are the […]