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Astronomy
Remembering Frank Drake, who transformed the search for alien life & extraterrestrial intelligence into a full-fledged scientific endeavor.
The last 70 years have taken us farther than the previous 70,000. But can we accomplish more than creating a record saying, "We were here?"
If your computer crashes, it might be due to a star that exploded somewhere in the Universe millions of years ago.
From black holes to dark energy to chances for life in the Universe, our cosmic journey to understand it all is just getting started.
Unexpected images of galaxies from the James Webb Space Telescope do not disprove the Big Bang. There are other likelier explanations.
Hubble revolutionized astronomy more than once. Here's what we can expect from the James Webb Space Telescope.
Should we be searching for life on other planets, or technology?
Do aliens dream about meeting us, too?
At their cores, stars can reach many millions or even billions of degrees. But even that doesn't touch the hottest of all.
The key problem with the dark matter hypothesis is that nobody knows what form dark matter might take.
There's an extra source of massive "stuff" in our Universe beyond what gravitation and normal matter can explain. Could light be the answer?
If you have an old TV set with the "rabbit ear" antennae, and you set it to channel 03, that snowy static can reveal the Big Bang itself.
Unless you have a critical mass of heavy elements when your star first forms, planets, including rocky ones, are practically impossible.
There's an extremely good chance that there is, or at least was, life on Mars. But is it native to Mars, or did it originate from Earth?
In all the Universe, only a few particles are eternally stable. The photon, the quantum of light, has an infinite lifetime. Or does it?
With a telescope at just the right distance from the Sun, we could use its gravity to enhance and magnify a potentially inhabited planet.
"You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it."
We only detected our very first gravitational wave in 2015. Over the next two decades, we'll have thousands more.
We knew we'd find galaxies unlike any seen before in its first deep-field image. But the other images hold secrets even more profound.
The surface of asteroid Bennu is more like a plastic ball pit than the Moon.
Searching for dark matter, the XENON collaboration found absolutely nothing out of the ordinary. Here's why that's an extraordinary feat.
A second Enlightenment would have a far bigger task: Saving civilization itself.
"The surface is no longer a record of every impact the moon has ever had, because at some point, impacts were erasing previous impacts."
4mins
Rituals come as much from religion as they do from the way Earth spins around the Sun.
Even though the leftover glow from the Big Bang creates a bath of radiation at only 2.725 K, some places in the Universe get even colder.
The costs of such an endeavor would be extremely high, while the potential payoffs would be uncertain.
Take a peek at the pre-release images used to calibrate and commission JWST's coldest instrument, now ready for full science operations.
The length of a day oscillates slightly every six years. This was a surprising discovery made last decade. We might now know why.
The psychology of alien contact largely revolves around the concept of "otherness." We need to learn to be comfortable around strange things.
