A single, complete view of half the world was enough to teach us how these distant, frozen bodies work. On July 14, 2015, NASA’s New Horizons flew by Pluto. Pluto’s atmosphere, […]

The medal-winning Norwegian team had a most unusual explanation for why their speed skaters wore blue. Is there any science to back it up? Every four years, the Olympics come around, […]

Okay, this is an incredible and rare opportunity, but I’m so pleased to announce that next January, from the 18th-24th, 2019, I’ll be leading an exclusive AstroTour of Iceland! We’ll […]

The season finale gets the one thing Star Trek is famous for — ethics — completely wrong. Life is full of dilemmas whose solutions seem paradoxical. To obtain peace, you must prepare for war. […]

If you want to go where no one has gone before, you have to make the investment. Here’s what last week’s launch means. If you want to send humans to Mars, […]

The hole in the ozone is shrinking, for sure, but to assess the whole layer, you need to look at the whole Earth. Throughout the history of life on Earth, there’s […]

Did you hear the story about how a 100 petawatt laser will finally ‘break the quantum vacuum’? Get the facts. Empty space, as it turns out, isn’t so empty. The fluctuations […]

It isn’t just for merging neutron stars, anymore. Over the past three years, there’s arguably been no greater scientific discovery than the direct detection of gravitational waves. The two LIGO […]

If everything goes right, astronomy will take a magnificent leap into the future. But here’s what needs to happen first. Back in 2000, NASA held their decadal survey, choosing what would […]

It’s so much more than mass-energy equivalence; it’s the key to unlocking the quantum Universe. For hundreds of years, there was an immutable law of physics that was never challenged: […]

If nothing can escape from beneath the event horizon, where do these phenomena come from? The most important feature of a black hole is that it has an event horizon: a […]

There’s nothing new, recent, or remarkable about it. It’s just a typical cosmic pebble in the galactic ocean. Last year, the interstellar interloper ʻOumuamua passed through the inner Solar System. Originally […]

The deep dive into the mirror Universe, and the ethics of how we deal with purity and diversity, is just getting started. Life in the mirror Universe isn’t easy for anyone. […]

What do our future missions in physics, astronomy, astrophysics and more hold? If you went back in time just 30 years, the world as we it was a completely different place. […]

Are we looking for life in all the wrong ways, like SETI with smoke signals? A little over 80 years ago, humanity first began broadcasting radio and television signals with enough […]

They’re less than a billion years old. And, thanks to ALMA, they might finally pave the way to understanding how galaxies form. How do galaxies like our Milky Way come to […]

They’re the fastest rotators of all. So how distorted are they? There are very few objects in the Universe that stand still; almost everything we know of rotates in some way. […]

A cosmic controversy is back, and at least one camp — perhaps both — is making an unidentified error. Ever since Hubble first discovered the relationship between a galaxy’s distance and its motion away […]

What if alien life — or even intelligence — don’t look like what we’re searching for? When the original Star Trek premiered, it was revolutionary for depicting sentient, intelligent species other than humans, living […]

Aiming for the nearest star would necessitate a whole slew of advances. Even if the mission fails, humanity wins by investing in itself. There have been some magnificent moments in NASA […]