Space & Astrophysics
Humans, when we consider space travel, recognize the need for gravity. Without our planet, is artificial or antigravity even possible?
All the stars, stellar corpses, planets, and other large, massive objects take on spherical or spheroidal shapes. Why is that universal?
A crowdsourced “final exam” for AI promises to test LLMs like never before. Here’s how the idea, and its implementation, dooms us to fail.
The 5th brightest star in our night sky is young, blue, and apparently devoid of massive planets. New JWST observations deepen the mystery.
Reusable rockets, moon landers, civilian astronauts, and more.
MIT Scientist Jason Soderblom describes how the NASA mission will study the geology and composition of the surface of Jupiter’s water-rich moon and assess its astrobiological potential.
Here’s the dark side of first contact.
Due to chaos, it was long thought that planets couldn’t stably orbit systems containing three stars. GW Orionis is the first counterexample.
Mars and Earth were sister planets in many ways, with early similar conditions. Why did Mars die? The leading explanation isn’t universal.
NASA’s space telescopes and observatories bring humanity unrivaled science images and scientific discoveries. Here’s what should be next.
In the year 1181, a “guest star” was recorded in the constellation of Cassiopeia. Its modern supernova remnant is weirder than we imagined.
Almost everyone asserts that the Big Bang was the beginning of everything, followed by inflation. Has everyone gotten the order wrong?
Many mavericks look to Einstein as a unique figure, whose lone genius revolutionized the Universe. The big problem? It isn’t true.
Beyond stars, galaxies, and gravity, studying the fundamental workings of nature reveals widely applicable lessons for learners everywhere.
More than two years after JWST began science operations, our Universe now looks very different. Here are its biggest science contributions.
What are dark matter and dark energy? The large-scale structure of the cosmos encodes them both, with ESA’s Euclid mission leading the way.
The secret sauce is the real world.
The most common visual depictions of the history of the Universe show the Big Bang as a growing tube with an “ignition” point. Why is that?
The fabric of spacetime is four-dimensional, with three for space and only one for time. But wow, time sure is different from space!
Could life be widespread throughout the cosmos, in the subsurface oceans of ice-covered worlds? NASA’s Europa Clipper mission investigates.
Caption:“At this time in Mars’ history, we think CO2 is everywhere, in every nook and cranny, and water percolating through the rocks is full of CO2 too,” Joshua Murray says.
An in-depth interview with astronomer Kelsey Johnson, whose new book, Into the Unknown, explores what remains unknown about the Universe.
There are a number of factors to consider when choosing where to build a telescope. These 3 locations, on their merits, surpass all others.
The Universe changes remarkably over time, with some entities surviving and others simply decaying away. Is this cosmic evolution at work?
Black holes encode information on their surfaces, but evaporate away into Hawking radiation. Is that information preserved, and if so, how?
Artificial intelligence is much more than image generation and smart-sounding chatbots; it’s also a Nobel-worthy endeavor rooted in physics!
Watching for changes in the Red Planet’s orbit over time could be new way to detect passing dark matter.
National Geographic’s first James Webb Space Telescope book shows us the cosmos like never before.
The earliest Milky Way-like galaxy, REBELS-25, was spotted rotating about its axis. It’s only 700 million years old: 5% of our present age.
Interferometry gave us a black hole’s event horizon, but that was in the radio. What can we accomplish with a new optical interferometer?