And the Macho King, Randy Savage! Over this coming week, things will be quiet here at Starts With A Bang, as I’ll be taking the next week off. But to help […]

Halley’s comet only visits every ~76 years, but its meteors arrive twice each year. The most famous comet of all — Halley’s comet — returns to our inner Solar System every ~76 years. Halley’s comet […]

Sure, we’re warming now. But will this continue, or will natural factors change things? According to our best understanding of Earth’s climate, the global average temperature has increased significantly over the […]

We’re Earth’s first intelligent, technologically advanced civilization. But maybe not the last. For most of our planet’s history, life in some form has existed on our world. Planet Earth formed some […]

Congratulations to Penrose, Ghez and Genzel, and to black hole enthusiasts everywhere. On October 6, 2020, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded towards research in black holes. 50% of […]

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 […]

At its biggest for the next 15 years, it’s still much smaller than the Moon. On October 6, 2020, Mars makes its closest approach to Earth until 2035. Earth orbits in […]

The anthropic principle has some fascinating scientific uses. And abuses, too. For thousands of years, humans have pondered the meaning of our existence. From philosophers who debated whether their minds could […]

We’re still not sure what the ultimate question is. Here are 5 excellent candidates. One of the most amusing stories in all of science fiction is Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s […]

A far-ranging conversation about telescopes, what they do, and who they impact. When most of us think of astronomy, we think about two types of scientists: the observers who point their […]

It wasn’t the birth of space and time. But it was truly essential to our cosmic story. For more than 50 years, we’ve had definitive scientific evidence that our Universe, as […]

California’s Bobcat Fire has reached Mount Wilson Observatory’s doorstep. 100 years ago, our understanding of the Universe was very different from what it is today. Einstein’s General Relativity, our theory […]

There are only 3 populations of stars, but “generations” is a more complex question. When we look out at the stars in the Universe, we classify them into three different […]

Have any of the stars we can see burned themselves out completely? When we look out across the Universe, we’re also peering back in time. In the early 21st-century, we’ve […]

In 2006, the IAU demoted Pluto. Here’s what we know today. In 2006, the last planet in our Solar System suffered an unforgettable insult, as Pluto — known for generations as our ninth […]

The view is different for each of us, but this perspective unites us all. From anywhere on Earth, the entire sky rotates a full 360° every 24 hours. From Earth, star […]

The pendulum didn’t tick right when they brought it here: the start of a fascinating story. For nearly three full centuries, the most accurate way that humanity kept track of […]

There was less than a 2 second delay between gravitational waves and light, but that’s incredibly meaningful. There’s an important rule in relativity that — as far as we know — all objects must […]

Just because something’s unlikely doesn’t mean that anything’s wrong. In our quest to understand the Universe, theoretical physics is perhaps the most powerful tool we have as far as making […]

It likely isn’t the rare occurrence we once thought it was. In our Solar System, there’s one overwhelming source of mass that all the planets orbit around: our Sun. Each planet […]