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Physics
LIGO’s enormous arms contract and expand as gravitational waves pass through them. But, puzzlingly, so does the light within them. For the past three years, humanity has known a new kind […]
Of all the experiments performed and measurements made involving fundamental particles, none has ever violated the Standard Model. Until now. If there’s one thing you can count on physicists for, it’s […]
Every physical theory has constants in it. The gravitational constant is remarkably uncertain. When we first began formulating physical laws, we did so empirically: through experiments. Drop a ball off […]
Dark matter is our leading theory for a reason. New, detailed studies of the smallest galaxies could kill off the most studied alternative. When you look out at the Universe, […]
Stars don’t stay the same throughout their life, and the Sun is no exception. Here’s what’s going on. Here on Earth, the ingredients for life to survive, thrive, evolve, and sustain […]
Before there were humans, planets, or even stars and galaxies, we had to make the first elements. Here’s how they happened. From the first moments of Big Bang to the […]
With every second that goes by, tens of thousands of star disappear from our reach. And it’s getting worse. It’s been nearly a century since scientists first theorized that the Universe […]
Never draw a conclusion, no matter how ‘obvious,’ without doing the experiment first. We all love our most cherished ideas about how the world and the Universe works. Our conception […]
In all the years of NASA, we’ve never touched the Sun before. Here’s why it’s so hard. This past weekend, NASA successfully launched the Parker Solar Probe: the first spacecraft that […]
In General Relativity, even space and time themselves aren’t what they seem. Gravity might have been the first fundamental force ever discovered, but in many ways, it remains the least-well understood. […]
The ices and rock aren’t green, and neither are the tails. So where does a comet’s green color come from? Every so often, with extreme regularity, comets will plunge from beyond […]
NASA’s Cassini spacecraft taught us more than we ever imagined about Saturn. Could we do something similar for Uranus and Neptune? From where we are in the Solar System, looking out […]
Mars will never look as big as the full Moon. But it isn’t even the biggest planet. From humanity’s perspective, the Sun and Moon always dominate Earth’s skies. The Moon and […]
Did the Universe begin at time t=0? Did space and time emerge from that? The Universe, today, is expanding and cooling, as the volume of the Universe increases while the number […]
How ‘special’ are we for life to have survived and thrived the way it did? While there are hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy, many with Earth-sized planets at […]
There’s a halo of dark matter permeating every galaxy, and that means its particles pass through us, too. The Universe, despite all the planets, stars, gas, dust, galaxies, and more we […]
Dark energy is pushing distant galaxies apart from one another at an increasing rate. If the Big Rip hypothesis is true, things will only get worse from here. One of the […]
What’s going on at the smallest and largest scales of all? Let’s look to the absolute limits of physics. Have you ever wondered what’s out there in the Universe, on the […]
And if we did, what would happen if you fell in? Out in the countryside of rural America, you can find all sorts of attractions that are too-good-to-be-true. One of the […]
In 2015, Ed Witten, the greatest living string theorist, wrote a piece on why. Here’s the version for everyone. It’s one of the most brilliant, controversial and unproven ideas in […]
If dark energy were stronger or weaker, everything would be pretty much the same. And that’s a puzzle. After the Big Bang, the Universe was full of matter and radiation. It […]
Just one equation relates the expansion of space to all the matter and energy we have. If you know this, you can know the fate of the Universe. Last week, […]
If it can stretch the Universe from the size of a subatomic particle to billions of light years in a fraction of a second, why doesn’t Einstein’s relativity forbid it? When […]
If everything was hot, dense, and super close-together at the Big Bang, what kept us from collapsing into a singularity? The Big Bang is one of the most counterintuitive ideas […]
For every planet that orbits a star like our own, there are likely thousands of ‘orphan planets’ wandering the galaxy alone. Here in the Solar System, we can watch our star’s […]
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, […]
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’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 December’s best natural sky show seems to get better every year, it isn’t your imagination. It’s science, and it’s spectacular! Every year, the Earth travels some 940 million kilometers […]
If you can’t explain the astrophysical signal that you see and cry ‘dark matter,’ chances are you’re not thinking hard enough. Despite our knowledge of the laws of physics, and the […]