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, 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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

We need more and better data to know, but that’s exactly what’s coming. Over the past few decades, a number of important advances have helped revolutionize our picture of the Universe. […]

Only 17 years after its discovery have we learned we’re safe from asteroid Apophis. Ever since its 2004 discovery, asteroid 99942 Apophis has threatened planet Earth. Asteroid Apophis has been measured […]

Something isn’t adding up, but it isn’t a calibration error. It’s been nearly 100 years since we discovered that the Universe was expanding. Ever since, the scientists who study the […]

Both views are equally spectacular, but unequally informative. Every so often, a creative amateur project highlights our professional achievements. This mosaic shows the region between the constellations of Cygnus and […]

Here are the best answers science has to a myriad of commonly asked questions. Over the past 12 months, the status of humans on planet Earth has changed dramatically. The […]

The most massive nearby stars could be the seeds our supermassive black holes need. The problem with the Universe, as we see it today, is that we only get a snapshot […]

A tiny layer of microscopic dust is the only reason it appears red. When we look out at our planet Earth from space, we see a myriad of diverse colors. The […]

It’s how successful our current theories are. Some 500 years ago, there was one scientific phenomenon that was, without controversy, extremely well-understood: the motion of the celestial objects in the sky. […]

It could have had any curvature at all. So why is it flat? What is the shape of the Universe? If you had come along before the 1800s, it likely never […]

We still don’t know what dark matter is, but at least we now know what it’s not. When it comes to science, we often say that it only takes a single […]