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Astronomy
Despite warnings and protestations from astronomers and skywatchers, Starlink is moving fast and breaking things. In May of this year, Elon Musk’s SpaceX launched the first group of its new satellite […]
The hot Big Bang occurred 13.8 billion years ago, and there’s no other possible answer consistent with what we know today. Conceptually, it might seem like the simplest idea in existence […]
The most famous ‘supernova impostor’ of all could have died back in the 1840s. Here’s what we think kept it alive. In all of astronomy, no stellar event releases more energy […]
If this discovery came in a pre-LIGO era, maybe it would have been a surprise. But in 2019, there’s no mystery at all. Did you hear that astronomers had recently […]
In science, breakthroughs don’t always begin with a ‘eureka’ moment. Sometimes, the true story is absolutely unbelievable. When it comes to our Universe’s origin story, many competing ideas once thrived. […]
Without this one ingredient, there wouldn’t be enough ‘glue’ to hold the Universe together. Of all the things in the Universe to be thankful for — the stars, planets, atoms, molecules, and […]
The shape of our Universe has long been recognized to be flat. But that isn’t the only possibility. The Universe is expanding, and goes on for farther than even our […]
If an AT-AT walker (or something even larger) wanted to walk across a frozen lake, how thick would the ice have to be? Each winter, one of the most spectacular phenomena […]
The Leonid meteor shower peaks today. Its parent comet taught us where meteor showers come from. Every year, as Earth regularly orbits the Sun, meteor showers repeatedly recur. While August’s Perseids […]
Even before MMA was a combat sport, it was a unique type of astronomy. Today, it’s opening up the Universe as never before. On February 24, 1987, a spectacular signal was […]
For decades, one of the Big Bang’s greatest predictions was shrouded in doubt. The answer was always there on Channel 3. When it comes to the question of how our Universe […]
And if the data is good enough, we can determine that it’s accelerating directly, too, silencing the last remaining doubters. If you want to understand what the Universe is made […]
On May 9, 2016, the prior transit of Mercury occurred, and was photographed many times on a practically continuous basis by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. Transits of Mercury are rare, […]
A theoretical view of a distant world so far from our Sun that our Solar System appears barely brighter than the remaining stars in the sky. ( Caltech/R. Hurt (IPAC)) Pluto […]
It might seem puzzling, in a Universe bound by the speed of light, that this could be true. Here’s the science behind it. If you look out into the distant Universe, […]
Scientists actively researching this have known the answer for quite some time. It’s time for everyone to catch up. The Big Bang happened 13.8 billion years ago, and is generally regarded […]
Young galaxies are bright and blue; old galaxies are red and dead. So how did this old, red galaxy form so early? The observable Universe contains two trillion distinct galaxies, but […]
Forget about alien nonsense. The Universe as it actually is doesn’t need any embellishments to be interesting. In our Solar System, the planets, moons, asteroids, comets and other masses are […]
If you think about the way a gravitational wave detector works, you might encounter a paradox. Here’s the solution. One of the greatest scientific achievements in all of human history […]
Our Universe is 13.8 billion years old, and our Sun formed about 2/3rds of the way through. Here’s what came before it. When it comes to the great cosmic question of […]
It’s been spectacularly confirmed by observation, but theoretically, it couldn’t have been any other way. If the Sun were to spontaneously cease emitting light, we wouldn’t know about it for about […]
If this newfound galaxy is just the tip of the iceberg, the entire Universe may fall into place. One of the greatest challenges for a scientist is that every time you […]
The origin story for our Universe got a major revision nearly 40 years ago. Time to catch up. 13.8 billion years ago, all the matter and energy contained within our Universe […]
It’s one of cosmology’s biggest unsolved mysteries. The strongest argument against it may have just evaporated. The ultimate goal of cosmology contains the greatest ambition of any scientific field: to […]
Traveling interstellar distances in human lifetimes is an amazing dream, but it won’t ever be achieved like this. For centuries, ever since we realized that every star we can see in […]
Simply getting into grad school isn’t enough. The answers to these three questions can make all the difference. It’s time. You’ve done all your research into schools, completed your undergraduate […]
If you think that the Moon is only good for reflecting sunlight, you’ve got another think coming. To human eyes, the Moon is the second brightest visible object, trailing only the […]
Even though it was the crowning achievement of Einstein’s career, he was only a small part of the full story. If you were a physicist in the early 20th century, there […]
We know a lot about what else is out there, but we still don’t know everything. In the quest for life in the Universe, it makes sense to look at […]
There’s so much we don’t know about fast radio bursts and galactic halos. Combined, we get a unique window on the Universe. Deep in space, mysterious signals known as Fast […]