Astrophysics

Astrophysics

A view of jupiter from space.
NASA's Juno mission, in orbit around Jupiter, occasionally flies past its innermost large moon: Io. The volcanic activity is unbelievable.
A bright light in the sky.
As planets with too many volatiles and too little mass orbit their parent stars, their atmospheres photoevaporate, spelling doom for some.
A tunnel is being constructed in a tunnel.
The DUNE project will beam tiny neutrinos across vast distances. But the first step involved moving a heavier material: 1 million tons of rock.
wormhole nasa illustration
Without wormholes, warp drive, or some type of new matter, energy, or physics, everyone is limited by the speed of light. Or are they?
A computer-generated image of a bright celestial object with an accretion disk, possibly representing what the sun looked like when it was born.
It took 9.2 billion years of cosmic evolution before our Sun and Solar System even began to form. Such a small event has led to so much.
Composition of the dark energy prominence universe showing percentages of dark energy, dark matter, and visible matter.
Early on, only matter and radiation were important for the expanding Universe. After a few billion years, dark energy changed everything.
Nasa's JWST captures spiral galaxies in a series of photos.
Stars are born, live, and die within the spiral arms of galaxies like the Milky Way. These 19 JWST spirals deliver unprecedented riches.
An image of a galaxy cluster.
If our Milky Way were located in the Virgo cluster instead of the Local Group, chances are we'd already be a "red and dead" galaxy.
An image of an egg with a blue and white pattern on it.
If there’s life lurking on the moons of Saturn and Jupiter, could our instruments even detect it?
An image of the surface of Mars, showcasing its captivating and unique geological formations resembling a grand canyon.
Valles Marineris is the Solar System's grandest canyon, many times longer, wider, and deeper than the Grand Canyon. What scarred Mars so?
The Milky Way, a galaxy in space filled with stars, grew up.
Our own galaxy, the Milky Way, is both completely normal and absolutely remarkable in a number of ways. Here's the story of our cosmic home.
An image of a red light shining on a dark background.
Millennia ago, philosophers like Anaximander grasped that nature is the ultimate recycler.
A digitally generated image of a glowing, elongated object framed by a translucent rectangle against a dark background with cosmic web-like structures.
On the largest cosmic scales, galaxies line up along filaments, with great clusters forming at their intersection. Here's how it took shape.
An image of a man standing in a black hole.
Want to avoid getting "spaghettified" by a black hole? Steer clear of the smaller ones.
A giant, colorful ring of glowing lines suspended in space
Astronomers claim to have found structures so large, they shouldn't exist. With such biased, incomplete observations, perhaps they don't.
A map of a cluster of stars illustrating star birth.
Here in our Solar System, we only have one star: a singlet. For many systems, including the highest-mass ones, that's anything but the norm.
A forest overlaid with an image of a city
The answer is set to change in the year 2113, a recent estimate suggests.
An image of a spiral galaxy with stars in the background, showcasing the mesmerizing beauty of cosmic formations.
The pattern 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, etc., is the Fibonacci sequence. It shows up all over nature. But what's the full explanation behind it?
An image of a planet with a moon, highlighting one of the first living worlds discovered.
Life became a possibility in the Universe as soon as the raw ingredients were present. But living, inhabited worlds required a bit more.
primordial black holes
Today, supermassive black holes and their host galaxies tell a specific story in terms of mass. But JWST reveals a different story early on.
An image of a purple galaxy in space.
Observations of an enormous cosmic structure, dubbed the "Big Ring," seem to violate the Copernican principle.
An artist's rendering of two **changed** planets in space.
Our cosmic home, planet Earth, has been through a lot over the past 4.5 billion years. Here are some of its most spectacular changes
An image of a sphere with stars in it.
For every proton, there were over a billion others that annihilated away with an antimatter counterpart. So where did all that energy go?
supernova remnant star formation spitzer
One newly discovered, ancient star has a composition unlike any other. Explaining its existence is already blowing astronomers' minds.
An artist's rendering of an evaporating exoplanet in the night sky.
Planets can be Earth-like or Neptune-like, but only rarely are in between. This hot, Saturn-like planet hints at a solution to this puzzle.
An image of a colorful object resembling a dark primordial galaxy in the sky.
Finding it at all was a happy accident. Examining it further may help unlock the secrets hiding within the earliest galaxies of all.
An image of a star nebula in space.
A new measurement offers insights on the density of the mysterious force driving the Universe's expansion.
A cat is sitting on a couch in front of a computer screen.
The record-breaking transmission could revolutionize deep space communication.
A gold cylinder with a yellow handle crafted for quantum computing.
Here in the 21st century, quantum computing is quickly going from a dream to a reality. But what's hype, and what's actually true?