Space & Astrophysics
There will always be “wolf-criers” whose claims wither under scrutiny. But aliens are certainly out there, if science dares to find them.
Leaving Hubble in the dust, JWST has officially seen a galaxy from just 320 million years after the Big Bang: at just 2.3% its current age.
The very dust that blocks our view of the distant, luminous objects in the Universe is responsible for our entire existence.
The most common element in the Universe, vital for forming new stars, is hydrogen. But there’s a finite amount of it; what if we run out?
Photons come in every wavelength you can imagine. But one particular quantum transition makes light at precisely 21 cm, and it’s magical.
We thought the Big Bang started it all. Then we realized that something else came before, and it erased everything that existed prior.
The science fiction dream of a traversable wormhole is no closer to reality, despite a quantum computer’s suggestive simulation.
Perhaps wormholes will no longer be relegated to the realm of science fiction.
A Carrington-magnitude event would kill millions, and cause trillions of dollars in damage. Sadly, it isn’t even the worst-case scenario.
Compared to Earth, Mars is small, cold, dry, and lifeless. But 3.4 billion years ago, a killer asteroid caused a Martian megatsunami.
The answer to this question is key to understanding why anything exists.
We’ll never be able to extract any information about what’s inside a black hole’s event horizon. Here’s why a singularity is inevitable.
The great hope is that beyond the indirect, astrophysical evidence we have today, we’ll someday detect it directly. But what if we can’t?
By studying the dwarf galaxy Wolf-Lundmark-Melotte ~3 million light-years away, JWST reveals the Universe’s star-forming history firsthand.
We confidently state that the Universe is known to be 13.8 billion years old, with an uncertainty of just 1%. Here’s how we know.
Every time our Universe cools below a critical threshold, we fall out of equilibrium. That’s the best thing that ever happened to us.
The strongest tests of curved space are only possible around the lowest-mass black holes of all. Their small event horizons are the key.
The Universe is 13.8 billion years old, going back to the hot Big Bang. But was that truly the beginning, and is that truly its age?
It is humanity’s biggest step yet into the Solar System.
There’s the textbook answer, then there’s the real answer.
SpinLaunch will cleverly attempt to reach space with minimal rocket fuel. But will physics prevent a full-scale version from succeeding?
We cannot afford to dream about living on other worlds while we continue to destroy ours.
From astrobiology to geology, a Moon base could serve as a laboratory unlike anything on Earth.
The image you’re seeing isn’t a hole in the Universe, and the cosmic voids that do exist aren’t hole-like at all.
We think of physical reality as what objectively exists, independent of any observer. But relativity and quantum physics say otherwise.
It’s rare that one single image packs so much beauty and science simultaneously. This Hubble view of a nearby star-forming region has both.
Supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies gobble up whatever matter ventures too close, becoming active. Here’s how they work.
We’re used to scientists telling us about the math and physics behind astronomical events. But what does studying space make us feel?
You are trapped in time. You never live in the world as it is but only as you experience it as it was.