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Astronomy
As the Earth spins and wobbles on its axis and revolves elliptically around the Sun, each day differs from the last. "24 hours" isn't right.
Today's Milky Way only forms stars slowly. Our galactic center, where the star-forming rate is highest, gives a unique window into our past.
Most of us have heard that the Sun is an ordinary, typical, unremarkable star. But science shows we're actually anything but average.
Our Big Bang could be just one region within an infinite, inflating multiverse. If we were born close to the cosmic edge, what would we see?
In 2025, two cleverly designed studies claimed to find evidence of strange objects orbiting Earth — years before humanity had put anything in space.
The sky and oceans are both blue. It's not because one reflects the other. Science explains them both, but for very different reasons.
The newest find recovers the earliest merger in galactic history: just 2 billion years after the Big Bang. Here’s what we know today.
1859's Carrington event gave us a preview of how catastrophic the Sun could be for humanity. But it could get even worse than we imagined.
We assume there's no preferred frame of reference in the Universe, and that light behaves the same in all directions. What if we're wrong?
We've now found many "conjoined" objects in the asteroid and Kuiper belts, including the first contact trinary, Nysa. What does it all mean?
On Earth's surface, we accelerate at 1g: 9.8m/s². In orbit, the acceleration is only slightly less. So why, then, are astronauts weightless?
Today, the world's largest operating optical telescope is 10.4 meters in diameter. These 3 facilities will lead astronomy's next generation.
With the National Solar Observatory's incredible DKIST, we see the Sun in the highest resolution ever. Its latest images blew us all away.
Few wavelengths of light reach Earth's surface; the others require going to space. What can the ultraviolet ASPERA space telescope do?
Obviously, the gas giants all top this list. But the fall-off is rapid after that, and the final two spots in the top 10 are truly shocking.
Human beings only see the Universe now: 13.8 billion years after the Big Bang. What would the earliest life, anywhere, have seen instead?
When people choose the greatest scientist of all, Newton and Einstein always come up. Here's why they should pick Johannes Kepler instead.
200 years ago, we hardly knew anything about our Universe on cosmic scales. Today, there's so much that we know. Here's how we arrived.
Our Universe has a positive, non-zero value to the energy within empty space. Can we potentially save ourselves by considering vacuum decay?
Although the Geminids have rivaled the Perseids recently, in 2026, the Perseids should win at their peak. Here's why, plus how to see them.
We've never witnessed a system of binary stars both go supernova before. A once-hidden source of gamma rays just revealed the first one.
In a gas cloud 26,000 light-years away, a 4-carbon sugar, erythrulose, has just been found. Here's what it means for life in the Milky Way.
Mathematics is our language for quantitatively describing reality, but it can also take us to worlds that never were. Physics needs more.
Despite the brilliance of these cosmic beacons, only 1% of a core-collapse supernova's energy is observable. The other 99% is in neutrinos.
With nearly 400 black hole events from gravitational waves, we can begin to infer their origins. At least two different populations emerge.
The history of atoms in the Universe is our own history: without them, there would be no us. So how do we piece their cosmic story together?
The LIGO facilities in the U.S. are the most sensitive gravitational wave detectors in the world. Their future remains uncertain.
At "only" 25 meters in diameter, the Giant Magellan Telescope is the smallest of three current projects. That might make all the difference.
Over 800,000 fireworks explode in under an hour in the world's largest fireworks shows. How do natural auroral displays compare in energy?
65 million years ago, a massive asteroid struck Earth, causing a mass extinction. Without advance warning, could anyone have spotted it?