Even with nothing new falling into it, our radius is increasing with every second that goes by. It’s no big secret that galaxies grow over time. The force of gravity is […]

Congress refused the majority of Trump’s proposed cuts to NASA’s budget. But many uncertainties remain. On March 21st, 2018, both branches of Congress passed the United States’ Consolidated Appropriations Act, […]

If everything was hot, dense, and super close-together at the Big Bang, what kept us from collapsing into a singularity? The Big Bang is one of the most counterintuitive ideas […]

With hundreds of billions of stars burning bright, ‘dead’ seems like a bit of an exaggeration. But every galaxy is headed for this fate, including ours. As long as a […]

Even our scientific heroes can’t be right about everything. Let’s learn the lessons that they never did. In the 1960s, a young theoretical physicist named Stephen Hawking rose to prominence as […]

There have been a lot of public advocates from the “no dark matter” camp, getting lots of popular attention. But the Universe still needs dark matter. Here’s why. If you took […]

The possibilities were almost limitless, so why does everything line up? Our Solar System is an orderly place, with the four inner planets, the asteroid belt, and the gas giant worlds […]

Distances in the expanding Universe don’t work like you’d expect. Unless, that is, you learn to think like a cosmologist. There are a few fundamental facts about the Universe — its origin, […]

LISA, the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna, will not only be the space-based successor to LIGO, but will predict black hole mergers up to years in advance. Across the Universe, innumerable masses […]

A single, complete view of half the world was enough to teach us how these distant, frozen bodies work. On July 14, 2015, NASA’s New Horizons flew by Pluto. Pluto’s atmosphere, […]

Okay, this is an incredible and rare opportunity, but I’m so pleased to announce that next January, from the 18th-24th, 2019, I’ll be leading an exclusive AstroTour of Iceland! We’ll […]

The Universe may defy our intuition, but that’s what science is for! If you take a look out at the Universe, and in every direction you look, you see objects rushing […]

Did you hear the story about how a 100 petawatt laser will finally ‘break the quantum vacuum’? Get the facts. Empty space, as it turns out, isn’t so empty. The fluctuations […]

It isn’t just for merging neutron stars, anymore. Over the past three years, there’s arguably been no greater scientific discovery than the direct detection of gravitational waves. The two LIGO […]

Would there be only blackness past the event horizon? Or something more? Black holes are some of the most perplexing objects in the entire Universe. Objects so dense, where gravitation […]

There’s nothing new, recent, or remarkable about it. It’s just a typical cosmic pebble in the galactic ocean. Last year, the interstellar interloper ʻOumuamua passed through the inner Solar System. Originally […]

What do our future missions in physics, astronomy, astrophysics and more hold? If you went back in time just 30 years, the world as we it was a completely different place. […]

They’re less than a billion years old. And, thanks to ALMA, they might finally pave the way to understanding how galaxies form. How do galaxies like our Milky Way come to […]

They’re the fastest rotators of all. So how distorted are they? There are very few objects in the Universe that stand still; almost everything we know of rotates in some way. […]

A cosmic controversy is back, and at least one camp — perhaps both — is making an unidentified error. Ever since Hubble first discovered the relationship between a galaxy’s distance and its motion away […]

What if alien life — or even intelligence — don’t look like what we’re searching for? When the original Star Trek premiered, it was revolutionary for depicting sentient, intelligent species other than humans, living […]

The Event Horizon Telescope has come online and taken its data. Now, we wait for the results. Black holes are some of the most incredible objects in the Universe. There are […]

How did black holes get so supermassive so fast? Astrophysics may be about to find out, thanks to three big 2017 discoveries. There’s a big problem when we look at […]

Out of five vital questions, which one should we most desire the answer to? Despite all we’ve learned about physics, science, and the Universe before us, there are still some incredibly […]

The ‘big discovery’ is nothing of the kind. We need a new planet-finding mission to probe the next frontier. Last week, NASA dropped a bombshell that it’s Kepler mission — the greatest […]

If you haven’t finished your holiday shopping yet, consider these 10 gifts, good any time of year! One of the hardest things when it comes to holiday shopping is to find […]

We’ve come so far since 2015; what do we know about dark matter now that we didn’t know then? Back in 2015, the dark matter situation was pretty straightforward: the large-scale […]

There’s so much that we’ve discovered, looking as deeply as possible into the void. But what are we missing? Start with the laws of physics, a Universe full of a specific […]

Just because it isn’t Thanksgiving anymore doesn’t mean we don’t have an entire Universe to be thankful for. Every day, we have a choice whether we take our lives, our existence, […]

If you can’t explain the astrophysical signal that you see and cry ‘dark matter,’ chances are you’re not thinking hard enough. Despite our knowledge of the laws of physics, and the […]