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Astronomy
Back in 1933, Fritz Zwicky postulated the existence of dark matter. Only 40 years later, with Vera Rubin's work, did we take it seriously.
What's communicable or reachable is different from what's observable and unobservable, and all of that will evolve as the Universe expands.
1g is our acceleration in Earth's gravity: 9.8m/s². If a spaceship constantly accelerated at that rate, here's how far we could travel.
In this all-new Starts With A Bang podcast episode, find out how stellar streams have the power to reveal the nature of dark matter.
Back in 2004, a supermassive black hole from 10.8 billion years ago was found, weighing in at 66 billion solar masses. How is this possible?
The biggest question most often asked about dark matter is whether it exists. But astrophysically, we've long moved on to the next step.
JAXA's Martian Moons eXploration mission has just launched. The origin of Phobos and Deimos are at stake, with samples returning home soon.
The right kind of telescope can get us to our central black hole. But it took something extra to go all the way to seeing its event horizon.
While we now actively listen for aliens, we've never made an intentional long-term broadcast ourselves. What signal should we ideally send?
The Hubble "constant" isn't actually constant, evolving over both time and space. Will it ever become constant? That depends on dark energy.
Compared to the scale of the cosmos, a single human body might seem insignificant. But there's an entire Universe within each of us, too.
Despite being the innermost and most absorptive planet, Mercury "only" reaches 800 °F at its hottest. Venus is always hotter, even at night.
From base to tip, Mars's Olympus Mons is the highest known mountain in the Solar System. Evidence suggests a higher one could be out there.
The expanding Universe, CMB, and large-scale structure revealed the Big Bang. New nucleosynthesis advances deliver unprecedented precision.
The observable Universe is 92 billion light-years in diameter. These pictures put just how large that is in perspective.
We strongly suspect we aren't alone in the Universe, but so far, we haven't found anyone. What determines when we'll finally make contact?
Although many of Einstein's papers revolutionized physics, there's one Einsteinian advance, generally, that towers over all the rest.
Millisecond pulsars are the Universe's most accurate natural clocks. A pulse change, thought rare, just occurred twice in the closest one.
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.