Despite the enormous flood of recent reports, there’s no good evidence for a lab leak. At the very end of 2019, a new disease began to emerge in humans: COVID-19. Originally […]

The sacrifices of early astronauts paved the way for Apollo’s successes, and so much more. In all of history, only 24 humans have ever escaped Earth’s gravity. The very first launch […]

Our galaxy not only isn’t stationary, but different parts are accelerating at different rates. When we think about the Universe as a whole, the accelerations that objects experience from our […]

And a combination of all three might take us farther than ever. If you want to see the farthest objects in the Universe, you have to know not only where to […]

‘Fast Optical Bursts’ will confound ground-based astronomy. As of 2021, planet Earth is currently experiencing the least pristine night sky in recorded history. Prior to the development of artificial lighting, […]

Has all this happened before, and will all this happen once again? There are only a few questions, when we ask them, that force us to reckon with the fundamental nature […]

It occurred naturally, and scientists know this for certain. Starting in late 2019, a novel strain of coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, began infecting human beings for the very first time. Discovered in samples […]

Even the ones hunting for aliens aren’t excited. Here’s the reason why. In this world, there are very few issues more polarizing than the notion of aliens. For as long as […]

Find out the truth for yourself. If this past year has shown us anything, it’s how thoroughly we rely on high-quality expertise. As the COVID-19 pandemic swept the globe, it […]

Even after our merger with Andromeda, we might retain our spiral shape for trillions of years. You probably don’t think about it very often, but the Milky Way galaxy won’t remain […]

Is it groupthink? Or is there a deeper reason? In the early half of the 20th century, even after the discovery of the expanding Universe, physicists considered a wide variety of […]

We have to use the right definition for the specific question we’re asking. When it comes to the Universe, we frequently characterize objects by examining and reporting on their physical […]

And, at some point, did the Milky Way lose ours? There are some 400 billion objects flying through the Milky Way galaxy with enough mass that — if they were all made of […]

Science can teach us so much about our planet, but something more must compel us to take care of it. If you want to understand our planet, the best way to […]

While Mars is known as a frozen, red planet today, it has all the evidence we could ask for of a watery past, lasting for approximately the first 1.5 billion […]

We’ve almost got the entire story. James Webb will put the last piece into place. In all of science, there are really only two ways that something can be “known” to […]

Mass determines a star’s fate… except when it doesn’t. Supernova events are common, visually spectacular astronomical cataclysms. In 1987, a supernova just ~168,000 light-years away was observed in the Large Magellanic […]

And could Earth-based life provide the seeds for biology elsewhere? Today, on Earth, there’s an enormous variety and diversity of life on our planet. Every single surviving lifeform appears, in […]

Even 13.8 billion years after the Big Bang, we can reconstruct the first 3 minutes. About 100 years ago, we began to truly understand the nature of the Universe for the […]

Only 3% of physics graduates and 2% of astronomy graduates are Black. That’s got to change. In the late 1990s, about 5% of the approximately 4000 bachelor’s degrees in physics per […]