Even the best science imaginable has its limits. In terms of ambition, it’s hard to ask for more than to know absolutely everything there is to know about the Universe. That’s […]

Some claim that inflation isn’t science, but it sure has made some incredibly successful scientific predictions. So, you want to know how the Universe began? You’re not alone. Every other […]

The world’s greatest observatory can go no further with its current instrument set. The Hubble Space Telescope has provided humanity with our deepest views of the Universe ever. It has […]

Dark matter, dark energy, inflation and the Big Bang are real, and the alternatives all fail spectacularly. If you keep up with the latest science news, you’re probably familiar with […]

It’s made up of scores of telescopes at many different sites across the world. But it acts like one giant telescope. Here’s how. If you want to observe the Universe more […]

How fast is the Universe expanding? The results might be pointing to something incredible. If you want to know how something in the Universe works, all you need to do […]

It might be the biggest conundrum facing cosmology today. But perhaps it’s not a controversy; it might be a clue. https://soundcloud.com/ethan-siegel-172073460/starts-with-a-bang-44-the-expanding-universe/ One of the biggest conundrums in the Universe surrounds the […]

And why Einstein’s quest for unification was doomed from the start. If you wanted to answer the question of what’s truly fundamental in this Universe, you’d need to investigate matter and […]

If a star spins and then collapses, what happens to its angular momentum? The most common way to form a black hole in the Universe is to have a massive […]

A single thought experiment reveals a paradox. Could quantum gravity be the solution? Sometimes, if you want to understand how nature truly works, you need to break things down to […]

We’ve put so much together about the Universe. Could it all come tumbling down? We’re always on the lookout for the next big thing, and even our best guesswork is often […]

And what do we still have left to learn? The original idea of a black hole goes all the way back to 1783, when Cambridge scientist John Michell recognized that a […]

The first image of an Event Horizon is here. Here’s what it means. Variety isn’t just the spice of life, but a natural consequence of living in our Universe. Gravitation, obeying […]

We’ve never seen an image of a black hole’s event horizon before. Here’s what we’re expecting, based on what we already know. For hundreds of years, physicists have hypothesized that the […]

If parallel Universes or the multiverse are real, we might someday encounter a visitor who hails from another one. Here’s what to do. There are a lot of things that are […]

What should a black hole look like? Our theoretical predictions are about to meet our first observations. In science, there’s no moment more exciting than when you get to confront […]

If dark energy is causing the Universe to disappear, how can we still find and see ultra-distant stars and galaxies? In the 1920s, scientists discovered that the Universe was expandingbased […]

LIGO and Virgo have now detected a total of 11 binary merger events. But exactly 0 were in the Milky Way. Here’s why. One of the most spectacular recent advances in […]

Both effects could be responsible for a redshift. But only one makes sense for our Universe. In physics, like in life, there are often multiple solutions to a problem that […]

If you understand gravity well enough, you might not even need a telescope to revolutionize astronomy. In science, advances arise at the intersection of theory and real-world observation. One of […]

Gravity gets weaker as the distance squared. But gravitational waves only get weaker as the distance. Why? One of the things we often just accept about the world is that […]

It’s been over 100 years since Einstein, and over 300 since Newton. We’ve still got a long way to go. From measuring how objects fall on Earth to observing the motion […]

Theoretical work tells you where to look, but only experiments can reveal what you’ll find. There are fundamental mysteries out there about the nature of the Universe itself, and it’s our […]

A new study claims that dark energy is changing with time. Here’s what it would mean, if true. For the past generation, we’ve recognized that our Universe is a particularly dark […]

The ability to instantaneously jump from one location in space to another clearly violates the laws of physics. Or does it? There are a few rules in the Universe that seem […]

With an assist from Einstein’s gravity and the power of the Hubble Space Telescope, it’s the brightest quasar we’ve ever discovered. In astronomy, there are two types of questions to […]

The reason why is simple, and should apply to every solar system like our own. On January 3rd, 2019, Earth reached the point in its orbit where it’s at its closest […]

When two black holes merge together, about 5% of their mass gets lost. Where does that information go? Do merging black holes lose information? They absolutely must, according to General […]

Despite what you may have heard, they don’t suck anything in at all. Black holes are some of the strangest, most wondrous objects in all the Universe. With huge amounts of […]

When you emit gravitational waves, they have to pass through the Universe. But do they gravitate, too? When you travel through the Universe, it isn’t just a free ride through […]