Astrophysics

Astrophysics

For its 2-year science anniversary, JWST has revealed unprecedented details in "the Penguin and the Egg." Here are the surprises inside.
earth sun magnetic magnetosphere
As the Sun ages, it loses mass, causing Earth to spiral outward in its orbit. Will that cool the Earth down, or will other effects win out?
dark energy accelerated expansion
Just 13.8 billion years after the hot Big Bang, we can see objects up to 46.1 billion light-years away. No, this doesn't violate relativity.
An illustration of a black hole surrounded by countless colorful stars in space, with several green lines indicating orbital paths around the black hole.
We know of stellar mass and supermassive black holes, but intermediate mass ones have long proved elusive. Until now.
Bullet Cluster separation mass gravity x-ray lensing
The Bullet Cluster has, for nearly 20 years, been hailed as an empirical "proof" of dark matter. Can their detractors explain it away?
Voyager 1
On a cosmic scale, our existence seems insignificant and inconsequential. But from another perspective, humans are completely remarkable.
A bright star shining in a dark sky filled with numerous smaller stars. The larger star appears at the center with a noticeable twinkle effect.
The standard picture of our Universe is that it's dominated by dark matter and dark energy. But this alternative is also worth considering.
A graphical representation illustrating the concept of the big bang and the subsequent expansion of the universe, depicted by a transition from a singular point of energy to a wide, grid-like spread of galaxies and celestial elements
On the largest of cosmic scales, the Universe is expanding. But it isn't all-or-nothing everywhere, as "collapse" is also part of the story.
5000 exoplanets
The structure of our Solar System has been known for centuries. When we finally started finding exoplanets, they surprised everyone.
Einstein with his class of students in 1896
There are many things that separate science from ideology, politics, philosophy, or religion. Follow these 10 commandments to get it right.
Close-up of a brown beetle viewed from the side under a microscope, showing its detailed body structure against a plain white background.
A long view of biological survival might point us to new possibilities for finding life elsewhere in the Universe.
The last infant stars are finishing their formation inside these pillars of gas. The evaporation of those columns is almost complete.
A series of sun positions during sunset over a landscape, with trees in the foreground and mountains in the background, creating a pattern of glowing points in the sky.
Sure, there's less daylight during winter than summer, as your hemisphere is tilted away from the Sun. But darkness goes deeper than that.
moon two faces
The near and far sides of the Moon are so different from each other, and no one is sure why. New lunar samples could confirm a wild theory.
All telescopes are fundamentally limited in what they can see. JWST reveals more distant galaxies than Hubble, but still can't see them all.
An artist's impression of a cluster of stars.
There was a time where no starlight was visible throughout the entire cosmos. That time was short-lived: shorter than astronomers imagined.
nasa merge black hole
Gravitational waves carry enormous amounts of energy, but spread out quickly once they leave the source. Could they ever create black holes?
Image of a large industrial machine with a green cylindrical component and a long metal rod inside a red and gray structure.
CERN's NA64 experiment used a high-energy muon beam technique to advance the elusive search for dark matter, offering new hope for solving one of astronomy's greatest mysteries.
A silver DeLorean car, modified to resemble the time machine from "Back to the Future," is parked on a street. People are standing nearby, marveling at the iconic vehicle, while an orange construction sign looms in the background, hinting at disruptions in travel time physics.
Traveling back in time is a staple of science fiction movies. But according to Einstein, it's a physical possibility that's truly allowed.
The sharpest optical images, for now, come from the Hubble Space Telescope. A ground-based technique can make images over 100 times sharper.
how many planets
From the coldest planets to spacecraft that have exited the Solar System, these little-known facts stump even many professional astronomers.
parallel universe
The Universe's history, from cosmic inflation to the Big Bang to the present, is known. But whether it's infinite or not is still a mystery.
universe temperature
Although the Big Bang occurred at an instant in time long ago, we still see the light from it. Will the evidence ever disappear completely?
Known as hypervelocity stars, we originally thought just one would be ejected every 100,000 years. The real number is much greater.
A vibrant solar flare erupts from the Sun's surface, showcasing sun activity in 2024 and emitting bright ultraviolet light in this detailed astrophotograph.
Northern lights in the American South, clusters of huge geomagnetic storms—the Sun is throwing a tantrum right on schedule.
A computer-generated image of a bright celestial object with an accretion disk, possibly representing what the sun looked like when it was born.
Newborn stars are surrounded only by a featureless disk. Debris disks persist for hundreds of millions of years. So when do planets form?
An image of a blue and white planet in space with starry background and a bright star on the right.
Out beyond Neptune are some fascinating bodies left over from our Solar System's formation. Could one of them truly be spectacular?
A solar image with digital counter displaying "0:MINUS" overlaid against the background of the sun with solar flares.
To know how to protect its astronauts, NASA needs to first understand the threat.
fusion power
From forming bound states to normal scattering, many possibilities abound for matter-antimatter interactions. So why do they annihilate?
A composite image shows the sun's path in the sky at different times of the year over a grassy landscape, with three arches of sun positions represented by dots, illustrating the earliest solstice.
On June 20, 2024, the summer solstice occurs at its earliest moment since 1796: when George Washington was President of the USA. Here's why.