In order, they go: hydrogen, helium, oxygen, carbon, neon, nitrogen, magnesium, silicon, iron, sulfur. Here’s how we made them. Everything found on planet Earth is composed of the same ingredients: atoms. […]
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The Universe’s idea of a ‘typical star’ has changed dramatically over time. When you look out at the Universe today, you’re not seeing it exactly as it is at one particular […]
Now is not the time to panic. But it’s the perfect time to get informed. The typical human body is made out of some 10²⁸ atoms distributed across approximately 100 […]
It’s not the only one of its kind, but it’s definitely makes no sense without dark matter. Throughout the Universe, galaxies and star clusters come in all different sizes and masses. […]
We might live in a quantum Universe, but we’ll violate the principle of relativity if space is discrete. If you try and divide matter into smaller and smaller chunks, you’ll […]
The original Hubble Deep Field truly showed us what the Universe looks like. Later this month, the Hubble Space Telescope will celebrate its 30th anniversary. This photo of the Hubble Space […]
And, if we have one, how close are we to it? No matter which direction we look in, or how far away our telescopes and instruments are capable of seeing, the […]
In physics, anything that isn’t forbidden must occur. So why don’t the strong interactions violate CP-symmetry? If you ask a physicist what the biggest unsolved problem facing the field today […]
Unbelievably enough, it all comes back to Pythagoras. One of the first theorems anyone learns in mathematics is the Pythagorean Theorem: if you have a right triangle, then the square […]
We still don’t know how the information encoded onto it gets out. No matter what you do in the Universe, its overall entropy always increases. Even when we put things in […]
It happened 13.8 billion years ago, so why hasn’t the radiation all passed over us by now? For the past 13.8 billion years, our Universe has been expanding, cooling, and gravitating. […]
It doesn’t have to be a science-fiction dream. For as long as human beings have been watching the night sky, we’ve dreamed of visiting other worlds and truly seeing what’s […]
"We can't allow people to get sick," President Donald Trump said from the Oval Office.
And what can it teach us about our Solar System’s earliest days? In many ways, astronomy is unique among the sciences. In every other field, you have the ability to design […]
Unequal gender dynamics still prevail even at the very top.
Many deserving potential awardees were snubbed by the Nobel committee. But this takes the cake. Every October, the Nobel foundation awards prizes celebrating the greatest advances in numerous scientific fields. Alfred […]
Could this finally be the clue we’ve hoped for in uncovering the truth about dark matter? In the physical sciences, theory and observation are supposed to work hand-in-hand. Theorists work out […]
From galaxies with no dark matter to ones with hundreds of times more dark matter than normal, our Universe needs it more than ever. One of the most mysterious substances in […]
Since 1957, the world's space agencies have been polluting the space above us with countless pieces of junk, threatening our technological infrastructure and ability to venture deeper into space.
Black hole mergers are some of the most energetic events in the Universe. Could the gravitational waves they produce ever harm us? The Universe is not a static, stable place. Out […]
‘Reductio ad absurdum’ won’t help you in an absurd Universe. Throughout history, there have been two main ways humanity has attempted to gain knowledge about the world: top-down, where we […]
Once only dark energy remains, empty space still won’t be completely empty. Imagine, if you dare, the very end of the Universe. The stars — past, present, and future — have all burned out. […]
Everything is being driven apart. But there’s hope of reaching what’s currently so far away. For the first 7.8 billion years, the Universe unfolded exactly as scientists would have expected in […]
At just 3 solar masses, it eliminates the “mass gap.” Searching for black holes is one of the most difficult astronomical games a scientist can play. Emitting no light of their […]
We’ve argued over ideology for far too long. It’s time to pick a better route to prosperity. In every civilized society around the world, there’s a trade-off that must be […]
Something isn’t adding up, but it isn’t a calibration error. It’s been nearly 100 years since we discovered that the Universe was expanding. Ever since, the scientists who study the […]
Maybe 100% of stars don’t have planets, after all. When stars form in the Universe, they’re created in giant bursts. A stellar nursery in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy […]
If all forms of energy experience gravitation, then why does dark energy make the expansion accelerate instead of slow down? Of all the revolutionary discoveries that we’ve made about the Universe, […]
First of a 3-part series about future technologies and their role in human flourishing.
Astrophysics has probed a test of a fundamental law, ‘Lorentz invariance,’ well beyond the LHC’s limits. Einstein is still right. The greatest scientific legacy that Albert Einstein left us is this: […]