Do they have real, observable effects, or are they merely calculational tools?

Is it groupthink? Or is there a deeper reason? In the early half of the 20th century, even after the discovery of the expanding Universe, physicists considered a wide variety of […]

Deniers will never stop misleading others. Here’s the truth. Every so often, advocates of a fringe theory — one that doesn’t fit the evidence as well as the mainstream theory — do what they can […]

We can do so much more, so much faster, with the same data. When you think about how astronomy works, you probably think about observers pointing telescopes at objects, collecting data […]

We have to use the right definition for the specific question we’re asking. When it comes to the Universe, we frequently characterize objects by examining and reporting on their physical […]

We give it the flight plan, and it takes care of the rest. It has to. Here’s why. No matter how advanced our technology becomes, there are certain limits that can […]

And which ones are probably examples where we’ve fooled ourselves? Every once in a while — multiple times per year — a new research finding fails to line up with our theoretical expectations. In […]

And, at some point, did the Milky Way lose ours? There are some 400 billion objects flying through the Milky Way galaxy with enough mass that — if they were all made of […]

If you’ve ever struggled with the strong force, this explanation is a life-saver. If you ask someone to think about some physical phenomenon that’s responsible for any sort of force […]

We can describe what we see happening, but we don’t understand why. Despite our vast cosmic knowledge, enormous unknowns remain. The quantum fluctuations inherent to space, stretched across the Universe […]

While Mars is known as a frozen, red planet today, it has all the evidence we could ask for of a watery past, lasting for approximately the first 1.5 billion […]

The Big Theoretical Physics Problem At The Center Of The ‘Muon g-2’ Puzzle In early April, 2021, the experimental physics community announced an enormous victory: they had measured the muon’s magnetic […]

Mass determines a star’s fate… except when it doesn’t. Supernova events are common, visually spectacular astronomical cataclysms. In 1987, a supernova just ~168,000 light-years away was observed in the Large Magellanic […]

The mismatch between theory and experiment is anything but certain. The most exciting moments in a scientist’s life occur when you get a result that defies your expectations. Whether you’re a […]

And could Earth-based life provide the seeds for biology elsewhere? Today, on Earth, there’s an enormous variety and diversity of life on our planet. Every single surviving lifeform appears, in […]

Even 13.8 billion years after the Big Bang, we can reconstruct the first 3 minutes. About 100 years ago, we began to truly understand the nature of the Universe for the […]

If you want to know what the Universe is like, you have to look at it in the right way. Only by observing it can we know what the Universe is […]

The densest objects that haven’t collapsed to black holes can tell us information about the Universe unlike anything else. Swarming through our own galaxy, we’ve detected quite a few bizarre objects: […]

Only 3% of physics graduates and 2% of astronomy graduates are Black. That’s got to change. In the late 1990s, about 5% of the approximately 4000 bachelor’s degrees in physics per […]

Enough mass in one location will always create a black hole. But not all masses are possible. If you take enough mass and compress it into a small enough volume […]