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History & Society
Trace how culture, power, and ideas shape societies across time.
As the Universe ages, will it eventually fade away entirely? The earliest signal we’ve ever directly detected from the Universe comes to us from shortly after the Big Bang: when […]
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 […]
There could have been life on Mars in the past, but that’s only the beginning of the story. For as long as humanity has been watching the skies, we’ve been fascinated […]
Some of them may have formed just 200 million years after the Big Bang. When we look out at the Universe, we’re not seeing objects as they are today, but rather […]
There are exposed planetary cores orbiting stars, and we may have already found them. When we take a look at the planets in our Solar System, there’s a pretty clear difference […]
There’s a boundary to how far back we can observe everything that exists. Despite everything we’ve learned about our Universe, there are many existential questions that remain unanswered. We don’t know […]
Our galactic home in the cosmos — the Milky Way — is only one of two trillion galaxies in the observable Universe. Our galactic home in the cosmos — the Milky Way — is merely one among the […]
For the first time in many years, there’s currently a comet visible to the naked eye in Earth’s night sky: comet NEOWISE. For the first time in many years, there’s currently […]
For northern hemisphere skywatchers, it might just be the century’s best comet so far. Every once in a while, large, icy objects pass through the inner Solar System. C/2014 Q2 (Lovejoy) […]
We still don’t know how it came to be this way. Every once in a while, we find an object in the Universe that completely mystifies us. For generations, astronomers have […]
Here’s how the closest place to “hell” in our Solar System might actually be home to life. From afar, Venus seems like the most uninhabitable planet of all. NASA’s Magellan mission […]
The theoretical reasons to expect it are compelling, but the technology required to detect it is unfathomable. All throughout our galaxy, millions of black holes of a variety of masses […]
There’s a lot left to understand, ponder, and investigate. And there always will be. For hundreds of thousands of years — nearly all of human history — we had no definitive answers to some of […]
From the right place at the right time, it’s a sight unlike any you’ll find on Earth. In our Solar System, any planet with moons has a chance for a solar […]
It’s perhaps the most famous thought experiment in all of physics, but is full of popular myths and misconceptions. One of the most bizarre ideas about the quantum Universe is […]
Without a little help from Einstein, we couldn’t have made this discovery. NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, currently celebrating its 30th anniversary, still churns out novel discoveries. The Hubble eXtreme Deep […]
This year’s June solstice coincides with a new Moon and an annular solar eclipse. Here’s how rare it truly is. As the Earth orbits the Sun, it rotates on its axis. […]
Nothing in the Universe can travel faster than the speed of light. So how does space itself do it? One of the fundamental rules we all learn in physics — set forth by […]
Too little breathing room, tear gas, and insufficient masks are a recipe for disaster. Police are worsening all three. Across the nation and the world, people of all skin colors are […]
Solid, liquid, and gas are the three everyone learns. Plasma is the fourth. But there are two more, and they’re fascinating. How many states of matter are there? When you […]