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Space Exploration
We first measured G, the gravitational constant, back in the 18th century. As the least well-known fundamental constant, can it be improved?
NASA’s Caleb Scharf talks with Big Think about life’s long experiment in expansion.
What if the first search for life beyond Earth actually succeeded?
Do aliens speak the same physics that we do, with similar laws, observables, and underlying mathematics. Maybe not, argues Daniel Whiteson.
We've now detected hundreds of gravitational waves with LIGO, Virgo, and KAGRA. What if we tried Weber's original method in the modern day?
The first world beyond Earth for human habitability should be the Moon, not Mars. This is why we should terraform our lunar neighbor first.
Scientists are notoriously resistant to new ideas. Are they falling prey to groupthink? Or are our current theories just that successful?
Red dwarfs are the Universe's most common star type. Their flaring now makes potentially Earth-like worlds uninhabitable, but just you wait.
Found by Hubble before JWST's launch, GNz7q looked like a mix of a galaxy and a quasar. Was it actually our first known "little red dot"?
"Think of it like a transcontinental railroad — not the fastest way to move a lot of mass, but certainly the most efficient,” Jared Isaacman said about nuclear electric propulsion.
The Orionids meteor shower peaks October 20th/21st here in 2025, coinciding with a new Moon. See the brightest shooting stars of the year!
Since the time of Galileo, Saturn's rings have remained an unexplained mystery. A new idea may have finally solved the longstanding puzzle.
In 2025, Earth remains the only planet where life is known to exist. Without a second example, "The Stand" has a vital lesson to teach us.
By deeply imaging a large volume of space, COSMOS-Web provides JWST's widest cosmic views. Its gravitational lenses reveal a big surprise.
From here on Earth, looking farther away in space means looking farther back in time. So what are distant Earth-watchers seeing right now?
As October begins, thousands of longtime NASA employees are leaving the agency. 4000+ will exit by January 9, 2026, changing NASA forever.
From the Big Bang to a prior period of cosmic inflation, our cosmic origins are clearer than ever. Yet these 5 big mysteries still remain.
Big Think spoke with astronomer David Kipping about technosignatures, "extragalactic SETI," and being a popular science communicator in the YouTube age.
The universe is filled with unlikely events, but it is also full of ways to fool ourselves.
Organic compounds can form through simple chemistry alone — making the search for true biosignatures trickier than it seems.
The red planet, Mars, may once have been teeming with life, just as Earth is today. Finding "organics" on Mars, however, doesn't mean life.
Dust is ubiquitous in the modern Universe, appearing in nearly all galaxies. But our cosmos was born dust-free. So where does it originate?
In revolutionary Russia, a group of forward-thinking philosophers offered an alternative to both futurism and communism.
It's the origin of our entire observable Universe, but it's still not the very beginning of everything.
The most common type of exoplanet is neither Earth-sized nor Neptune-sized, but in between. Could these haze-rich worlds house alien life?
JWST isn't the first telescope to peer into this factory of star-birth some 5500 light-years away, but its views are the most educational.
Going back to 1990, we hadn't even found one planet outside of our Solar System. As we close in on 6000, we now see many of them directly.
Since even before Einstein, physicists have sought a theory of everything to explain the Universe. Can positive geometry lead us there?
The Juno spacecraft, orbiting and imaging Jupiter since 2016, is still succeeding. Without a further extension, the mission now faces death.
As we look to larger cosmic scales, we get a broader view of the expansive cosmic forest, eventually revealing the grandest views of all.