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Cosmology
The Big Bang happened everywhere at once, but stars are a different story. The Universe, back at its inception, was almost perfectly identical everywhere. It was the same high temperature […]
White dwarfs, neutron stars, and brown dwarfs aren’t actually stars at all. Here’s why. When it comes to stars, there’s a huge variety of different types out there. Our Sun is […]
Billions of years from now, dark energy will push the rest of the Universe out of reach forever. These galaxies will be the last to go. A look at the night […]
If the Sun is 93 million miles away, why does sunlight filtering through the clouds or the trees spread out? Rays of sunshine are one of those natural sights that leave […]
The world’s greatest clockmaker sent a clock to the new world, and everything went haywire. The reason why will shock you. For millennia, humanity’s one-and-only reliable way to keep time was […]
For 100 million years, there was only creation in the Universe. Meet our first moments of destruction. The cosmic story that gave rise to us is a story rife with […]
If all you see is low-energy light in a myriad of directions, you can’t be sure. But this light comes from the Big Bang. There are a lot of things that […]
These three reasons are why there’s no getting around the fact that astronomy needs the James Webb Space Telescope. Even the most powerful telescope in history, the Hubble Space Telescope, […]
LIGO’s enormous arms contract and expand as gravitational waves pass through them. But, puzzlingly, so does the light within them. For the past three years, humanity has known a new kind […]
The nightmare scenario of no new particles or interactions at the LHC is coming true. And it might be our own fault. Over at the Large Hadron Collider, protons simultaneously circle […]
Shortly after the Big Bang, the Universe became completely dark. The first stars, when they ignited, changed everything. For perhaps 100 million years, the Universe was devoid of stars. The […]
An Oxford physicist tries to cast doubt on dark energy, but the data says otherwise. It was a mere 20 years ago that our picture of the Universe got a […]
Our biases, preferences, and ideas of simplicity and elegance can get in the way. Here’s a scientific way to cut through them all. What are the rules governing reality? If you […]
Not everyone is satisfied with the Big Bang. But every alternative is a disastrous failure. It’s treated as though it’s an unassailable scientific truth: 13.8 billion years ago, the Universe […]
Dark matter is our leading theory for a reason. New, detailed studies of the smallest galaxies could kill off the most studied alternative. When you look out at the Universe, […]
One of the most popular viral videos about space is dead wrong. But it gives us a chance to learn something incredible. There are a lot of moving parts to […]
It took hundreds of thousands of years to make atoms for the first time. If things were just a little different, it could have taken an eternity. When it comes […]
Stars don’t stay the same throughout their life, and the Sun is no exception. Here’s what’s going on. Here on Earth, the ingredients for life to survive, thrive, evolve, and sustain […]
Our Universe may not be all there is, was, or ever will be, after all. There’s been a lot of speculative ideas put forth about the Multiverse, and I dare say […]
Before there were humans, planets, or even stars and galaxies, we had to make the first elements. Here’s how they happened. From the first moments of Big Bang to the […]
Different measurements of the Universe’s rate of expansion give inconsistent results. But this simple solution could fix everything. In 1915, Einstein’s theory of General Relativity gave us a brand new […]
With every second that goes by, tens of thousands of star disappear from our reach. And it’s getting worse. It’s been nearly a century since scientists first theorized that the Universe […]
The Universe was born matter-antimatter symmetric. Here’s what happened when the last of our antimatter disappeared. Things happen fast in the earliest stages of the Universe. In the first 25 […]
The Universe is an enormous place, but we can’t see all the way back to the beginning. Here’s the latest record-breaker. No matter how far back we look in the […]
In General Relativity, even space and time themselves aren’t what they seem. Gravity might have been the first fundamental force ever discovered, but in many ways, it remains the least-well understood. […]
Space may be enormous, but collisions are inevitable. Here’s what happens when they occur. The Universe as we know it has been around for nearly 14 billion years: plenty of time […]
The ices and rock aren’t green, and neither are the tails. So where does a comet’s green color come from? Every so often, with extreme regularity, comets will plunge from beyond […]
It wasn’t just the Milky Way and Andromeda two billion years ago. Here in the Local Group, our two largest galaxies dominate: Andromeda and the Milky Way. Our Local Group of […]
Did the Universe begin at time t=0? Did space and time emerge from that? The Universe, today, is expanding and cooling, as the volume of the Universe increases while the number […]
The Universe was born with equal amounts of matter and antimatter. How did matter win? 13.8 billion years ago, at the moment of the Big Bang, the Universe was the hottest […]