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Astrophysics
Scientists may have detected the somewhat smelly chemical dimethyl sulfide on a planet 120 light-years from Earth.
Dark matter hasn't been directly detected, but some form of invisible matter is clearly gravitating. Could the graviton hold the answer?
A spherical structure nearly one billion light-years wide has been spotted in the nearby Universe, dating all the way back to the Big Bang.
The matter that creates black holes won't be what comes out when they evaporate. Will the black hole information paradox ever be solved?
In 1987, the closest supernova directly observed in nearly 400 years occurred. Will a pulsar arise from those ashes? JWST offers clues.
When it comes to predicting the energy of empty space, the two leading theories disagree by a factor of 100 googol quintillion.
The asteroid is expected to come within 140,000 miles of Earth — well inside the moon’s orbit.
Three fundamental forces matter inside an atom, but gravity is mind-bogglingly weak on those scales. Could extra dimensions explain why?
Newton thought that gravitation would happen instantly, propagating at infinite speeds. Einstein showed otherwise; gravity isn't instant.
There are a few clues that the Universe isn't completely adding up. Even so, the standard model of cosmology holds up stronger than ever.
With ~400 billion stars in the Milky Way and 6-20 trillion galaxies overall, that makes for a lot of stars. But not as many as you'd think.
The biggest, brightest galaxies are the easiest to spot, but the tiniest ones teach us about how the Milky Way assembled and grew up!
American students are being compelled to specialize earlier and earlier. Here's what it takes to build a successful physics foundation.
When the average person has a "theory," they're just guessing. But for a scientist, a theory is the pinnacle of what we can achieve.
The "Ring Nebula," known for almost 250 years, is so much more than a Ring. With JWST's capabilities, we're seeing more than ever before.
By looking down, scientists are looking back in time.
The Universe isn't just expanding, the expansion is also accelerating. If that's true, how will the Milky Way and Andromeda eventually merge?
The first observational evidence showing the Universe is expanding is 100 years old now: in 2023. Here's the story of its 100th anniversary.
How fast is the Universe expanding? Two major methods disagree. New JWST data, just released, strengthens this Hubble tension even further.
Whether you call it 10 quintillion, 10 million trillion, or 10 billion billion, it's a 1 followed by 19 zeroes.
Some constants, like the speed of light, exist with no underlying explanation. How many "fundamental constants" does our Universe require?
Two fundamentally different ways of measuring the expanding Universe disagree. What's the root cause of this Hubble tension?
The Schumann resonances are the background hum of the entire planet. But they don't affect humans in any way.
As Marcel Proust said, “The real voyage of discovery... consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
The visible Universe extends 46.1 billion light-years from us, while we've probed scales down to as small as ~10^-19 meters.
How scientists are hearing the gravitational background "hum" of the Universe for the very first time.
Einstein's laws of gravity have been challenged many times, but have always emerged victorious. Could wide binary stars change all that?
Each of our three nearest stars might have an Earth-like planet in orbit around it. Here's what we'll learn when we finally observe it.
From when its light was emitted, the El Gordo galaxy cluster might be the most massive object in all of existence. Here's how JWST sees it.