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Astrophysics
35mins
Dispatches host Kmele Foster is on a journey to understand humanity’s role in the cosmos. His first stop? The Atacama Plateau in Northern Chile, home to the darkest deserts and largest telescopes on earth.
For the first time, astronomers have created a data-driven estimate for how many black holes are in our Universe: more than anyone expected.
See the 3 biggest space stories from October 16-22, 2023.
Sophisticated rovers have found the conditions for Martian life, as well as the building blocks of life, but never life itself. AI can help.
12mins
When black holes disappear, what happens to the stuff that fell in? Physicist Brian Cox explains.
If you said "with the Big Bang," congratulations: that was our best answer as of ~1979. Here's what we've learned in all the time since.
Einstein's theory of general relativity introduced the concept of space having a shape. So, what is the shape of space?
"If we find just one other example of biology out there, then life is not an accident."
There's a quantum limit to how precisely anything can be measured. By squeezing light, LIGO has now surpassed all previous limitations.
A true scientific view of if, where, and when extraterrestrial life exists is within our grasp thanks to biosignatures and technosignatures.
A woman’s name would undermine the credibility of the mission. Names of former Nazis, however, were no problem.
“To take this in, you need to ride inside the mathematical symbols.”
JWST has already broken many of Hubble's cosmic records. Perhaps additional record-breakers already exist within this data-rich image?
Back during the hot Big Bang, it wasn't just charged particles and photons that were created, but also neutrinos. Where are they now?
We don’t need to think about what life is made of but rather what it does.
Although we still don't know the question, we know that the answer to life, the Universe, and everything is 42. Here are 5 possibilities.
Considering the astronomical occupational risks, life insurance was prohibitively expensive for the first NASA astronauts.
6mins
Humanity is a type 0 civilization. Here’s what types 1, 2, and 3 look like, according to physicist Michio Kaku.
Hermann Minkowski called Einstein a "lazybones" with a "not very solid" education. Less than 10 years later, he would eat his words.
The Universe, although violent, is filled with creation events following destructive ones. 1850 light-years away, both types are unfolding.
Between the least massive star and most massive planet lies the mysterious brown dwarf: a class of objects that are neither star nor planet.
From the Big Bang to black holes, singularities are hard to avoid. The math definitely predicts them, but are they truly, physically real?
Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein are locked in an eternal battle over the nature of gravity. Whose side are you on?
Measurements of the acceleration of the universe don’t agree, stumping physicists working to understand the cosmic past and future. A new proposal seeks to better align these estimates — and is likely testable.
In the largest star-forming region close to Earth, JWST found hundreds of planetary-mass objects. How do these free-floating planets form?
With so many early galaxies of unexpectedly large brightnesses, JWST surprised us all. Here's how scientists made sense of what we see.
Every astrobiologist wants to find an alien. But the public should be skeptical when the "aliens" look like tiny humans.
The question of why the Universe is the way it is is an ancient one, and none of the answers we have come up with are satisfying.
If nature were perfectly deterministic, atoms would almost instantly all collapse. Here's how Heisenberg uncertainty saves the atom.
In the quest to measure how antimatter falls, the possibility that it fell "up" provided hope for warp drive. Here's how it all fell apart.