Space & Astrophysics
If the evolution of the Universe is a movie, what happens when we rewind it all the way backward?
Gamma-ray bursts are among the most energetic cosmic events of all. On October 9, 2022, a remarkable one occurred: the brightest ever seen.
Time gets a little strange as you approach the speed of light.
That scary swirling void from which nothing can escape is our perfect universal translation tool.
Many galaxies really are ultra-distant, but some are just intrinsically red or dusty. Only with spectroscopy can JWST tell which is which.
Explanations for the cosmic speed limit often conflate mass with inertia.
Mercury, Venus, and Mars are all uni-plate planets, and may always have been. Here’s what’s known about why Earth, uniquely, has plate tectonics.
We are about to learn a lot more about the most elusive of cosmic particles.
Lots of people have seen lots of bizarre events and phenomena that defy our conventional experience. But is there a scientific explanation?
Temperatures in the Sun’s core exceed 10 million degrees Celsius. But how on Earth did we actually come to know that?
What do we mean by a black hole’s size? A photon sphere? The minimal stable orbit? The event horizon? The singularity? Which one is right?
Speeding through the Universe and leaving a wake of new stars, this runaway supermassive black hole is likely the first among thousands.
This beautiful JWST image of Wolf-Rayet star WR 124 has been called a “prelude to a supernova” by NASA. That might be entirely wrong.
2023 is an exciting time for the study of quark-gluon plasmas.
Everything everywhere all at once.
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.
How scientists found out that we live in a cosmic aquarium.
When supermassive black holes merge, they emit more energy than anything else to occur in our Universe except the Big Bang.
We can’t go back to the Big Bang, nor ahead to the heat death of the Universe. Nevertheless, here are today’s natural temperature extremes.
Somewhere out there in the Universe is the heaviest neutron star, and elsewhere lies the lightest black hole. Where’s the line between them?
Two very different ideas, wormholes and quantum entanglement, might be fundamentally related. What would “ER = EPR” mean for our Universe?
Even with quantum teleportation and the existence of entangled quantum states, faster-than-light communication still remains impossible.
Not even Einstein immediately knew the power of the equations he gave us.
The zero-point energy of empty space is not zero. Even with all the physics we know, we have no idea how to calculate what it ought to be.
What kind of object will you form? What will its fate be? How long will a star live? Almost everything is determined by mass alone.
If stars don’t go supernova at first, they can get a second chance after becoming a white dwarf. But can their companions survive?
The road to intelligent life is a series of hard steps.
In our Solar System, even the two brightest planets frequently align in our skies. But only rarely is it spectacularly visible from Earth.
All human development, from large cities to small towns, shines light into the night sky.