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Universe Expansion
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 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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
The origin of the 3rd element on the periodic table was one of the great cosmic mysteries. We just solved it. How did we form the elements that pervade the Universe […]
Maybe 100% of stars don’t have planets, after all. When stars form in the Universe, they’re created in giant bursts. A stellar nursery in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy […]
Think they all burn through their fuel, die, and leave white dwarfs, neutron stars, or black holes behind? Think again. The day will come when our Sun, like most stars, can […]
In order, they go: hydrogen, helium, oxygen, carbon, neon, nitrogen, magnesium, silicon, iron, sulfur. Here’s how we made them. Everything found on planet Earth is composed of the same ingredients: atoms. […]
There’s some amazing science happening at the South Pole, but some very grandiose claims being made. What’s actually going on? For some of us, the idea of parallel Universes spark our […]
Extraterrestrial life should arise fairly easily. But intelligence is another matter entirely. Planet Earth has been around for the past 4.5 billion years or so: about the last third of […]
Mathematics is the most useful tool we have for understanding the Universe. But it doesn’t answer to anything on its own. At the frontiers of theoretical physics, many of the most […]
If you traveled in a straight line for far enough, would you come back to where you started? If you were to set out on a journey from anywhere on Earth’s […]
We just found the first one within 1,000 light-years of us. But there’s probably one much, much closer. For a long time, black holes were known to exist only in the […]
There’s a million things we haven’t done. But just you wait. The Universe as we know it began some 13.8 billion years ago with the onset of the hot Big Bang. […]
On the largest scales, dark matter holds the Universe together. But on small ones, it helps reveal exactly what it is… and isn’t! Dark matter is often thought of as the […]
All the things that surround us and make us up weren’t always here. But where did it all come from? The Universe, as we see it today, sure is full of […]
A generation ago, NASA launched their great observatories to explore the Universe. It’s time for round 2. Throughout the history of astronomy, every advance we’ve ever made has come about because […]
It’s 100 years since astronomy’s famous ‘great debate.’ We still haven’t learned the most compelling lesson of all. So, you’ve arrived at a crossroads: you think the world works in a […]
In both visible light and infrared, we get a preview of the spectacular advances that await the James Webb Space Telescope. What astronomers see isn’t just determined by the telescope […]
Over the past 30 years, we’ve revolutionized what we know about the Universe. But we couldn’t have done it without these lessons. On April 24, 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope rocketed […]
Its record-holding galaxy is 32 billion light-years away, in a Universe that’s only 13.8 billion years old. On April 24, 2020, humanity celebrates the 30th anniversary of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. […]