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Contracting gas clouds don't just make a single star, but a spectrum, with all different masses. Early on, that spectrum differed. But why?
Protons and neutrons are composite structures: made of quarks and gluons. But knowing they had substructure goes back long before that.
Yes, "the laws of physics break down" at singularities. But relativity itself would have to be wrong for black holes to not possess them.
Long before “move fast and break things,” aerospace pioneer Kelly Johnson built the Skunk Works — Lockheed Martin’s R&D arm famous for its problem-solving and revolutionary creations.
It's the Universe's ultimate chicken-and-egg question: what came first, the galaxy or the black hole? One Little Red Dot proves the answer.
In 2016, humanity announced our first successful gravitational wave detection. 10 years and 389 events later, here's how far we've come.
The Astro2020 decadal report set the USA's agenda for space and ground-based astronomy. Here in 2026, we're clearly on the wrong course.
Two discrete symmetries, charge conjugation and parity, must be violated together for our Universe to exist. We haven't found enough of it.
From snowboarding crows to salmon-hat orcas, scientists are uncovering the deeper evolutionary purposes of play.
From early arcades to AI-generated worlds, video games have continually expanded the “magic circle” of play.
Wargames are helping answer one of the biggest questions of the AI era: how machines might reshape human decision-making in war.
Many people, now with LLM assistance, regularly claim to discover game-changing revolutions. Scientists don't buy it. You shouldn't either.
Despite all that we've discovered, Earth remains the only planet definitively known to possess life. Here's how to find a second example.
CERN's Large Hadron Collider superseded Fermilab's TeVatron in 2008, but now nears the end of its run. The ambitious FCC project comes next.
At and beyond the current frontiers of knowledge, many physicists have strongly held opinions. Can surveys point the way to breakthroughs?
The original idea of the Big Bang was synonymous with a singularity: a point of zero volume. In this Universe, things never got that small.
Theoretical physics is notorious for wild ideas that seem, at first, to be nonsensical fantasies. That's where the tooth fairy comes in.
Animal-to-human organ transplants promise a future where survival no longer depends on another person’s death.
Vague predictions and post hoc revisions help astrology feel meaningful, even while it fails empirical testing.
Astronomers study our cosmic history through stellar and galactic archaeology. But we can't conduct archaeology in space. At least, not yet.
Light pollution now steals a pristine night sky from the majority of humanity. The rise of LED lighting, primarily since 2014, is to blame.
Today, in the here-and-now, a full 13.8 billion years have elapsed since the start of the hot Big Bang. But would that be true for everyone?
In physics, we reduce things to their elementary, fundamental components, and build emergent things out of them. That's not the full story.
Messier 77 is one of the largest nearby spiral galaxies, with an active, brilliant core. Here's what JWST's incomparable eyes saw inside it.
A look at what could be if we ignore the doomers and make the most of AI.
A relatively tiny world in the Kuiper belt, just 500 km in diameter, has an atmosphere after all, joining Pluto. Here's what we know today.
The soils of "managed forests" can take decades to rebuild the carbon stocks and microbial communities found in undisturbed forests.
Only nearby objects appear to the naked eye. With telescopes of all types, especially in space, we've smashed those records many times over.
Triton is Neptune's largest moon today, but it was once the undisputed king of the Kuiper belt. Here's why the outer solar system matters.
There's a lot of room in interplanetary, interstellar, and intergalactic space, but just how low the densities go is truly mind-boggling.