Since the time of Galileo, Saturn’s rings have remained an unexplained mystery. A new idea may have finally solved the longstanding puzzle.
Quantum mechanics was first discovered on small, microscopic scales. 2025’s Nobel Prize brings the quantum and large-scale worlds together.
In 2025, Earth remains the only planet where life is known to exist. Without a second example, “The Stand” has a vital lesson to teach us.
By deeply imaging a large volume of space, COSMOS-Web provides JWST’s widest cosmic views. Its gravitational lenses reveal a big surprise.
As the Universe ages, it continues to gravitate, form stars, and expand. And yet, all this will someday end. Do we finally understand how?
From here on Earth, looking farther away in space means looking farther back in time. So what are distant Earth-watchers seeing right now?
As October begins, thousands of longtime NASA employees are leaving the agency. 4000+ will exit by January 9, 2026, changing NASA forever.
Proposed over 2000 years ago by Democritus, the word atom literally means uncuttable. Revived in 1803, today’s “atoms” can indeed be split.
From the Big Bang to a prior period of cosmic inflation, our cosmic origins are clearer than ever. Yet these 5 big mysteries still remain.
If you think of the Big Bang as an explosion, we can trace it back to a single point-of-origin. But what if it happened everywhere at once?
All of the matter that we measure today originated in the hot Big Bang. But even before that, and far into the future, it’ll never be empty.
The hot Big Bang is often touted as the beginning of the Universe. But there’s one piece of evidence we can’t ignore that shows otherwise.
As we gain new knowledge, our scientific picture of how the Universe works must evolve. This is a feature of the Big Bang, not a bug.
The universe is filled with unlikely events, but it is also full of ways to fool ourselves.
Just because a paper passes peer review doesn’t mean that what’s written, or what the author asserts, is true. Here’s why it still matters.
It’s not just an odd quirk of numbers that makes it true, but a deep mathematical insight that dates all the way back to Pythagoras.
10 years ago, LIGO first began directly detecting gravitational waves. Now better than ever, it’s revealing previously unreachable features.
Questions about our origins, biologically, chemically, and cosmically, are the most profound ones we can ask. Here are today’s best answers.
The red planet, Mars, may once have been teeming with life, just as Earth is today. Finding “organics” on Mars, however, doesn’t mean life.
Dust is ubiquitous in the modern Universe, appearing in nearly all galaxies. But our cosmos was born dust-free. So where does it originate?
It’s the origin of our entire observable Universe, but it’s still not the very beginning of everything.
The most common type of exoplanet is neither Earth-sized nor Neptune-sized, but in between. Could these haze-rich worlds house alien life?
The Holy Grail of physics is a Theory of Everything: where a single equation describes the whole Universe. But maybe there simply isn’t one?
JWST isn’t the first telescope to peer into this factory of star-birth some 5500 light-years away, but its views are the most educational.
Going back to 1990, we hadn’t even found one planet outside of our Solar System. As we close in on 6000, we now see many of them directly.
Since even before Einstein, physicists have sought a theory of everything to explain the Universe. Can positive geometry lead us there?
Across all wavelengths of light, the Sun is brighter than the Moon. Until we went to the highest energies and saw a gamma-ray surprise.
The Juno spacecraft, orbiting and imaging Jupiter since 2016, is still succeeding. Without a further extension, the mission now faces death.
With several seemingly incompatible observations, cosmology faces many puzzles. Could early, supermassive stars be the unified solution?
As we look to larger cosmic scales, we get a broader view of the expansive cosmic forest, eventually revealing the grandest views of all.