If you think about the way a gravitational wave detector works, you might encounter a paradox. Here’s the solution. One of the greatest scientific achievements in all of human history […]

100+ years ago, General Relativity came along, and Einstein gave the Universe a cosmological constant. Here’s why that was a mistake. Back in the 17th century, Isaac Newton put forth the […]

It’s been spectacularly confirmed by observation, but theoretically, it couldn’t have been any other way. If the Sun were to spontaneously cease emitting light, we wouldn’t know about it for about […]

If this newfound galaxy is just the tip of the iceberg, the entire Universe may fall into place. One of the greatest challenges for a scientist is that every time you […]

The origin story for our Universe got a major revision nearly 40 years ago. Time to catch up. 13.8 billion years ago, all the matter and energy contained within our Universe […]

It’s one of cosmology’s biggest unsolved mysteries. The strongest argument against it may have just evaporated. The ultimate goal of cosmology contains the greatest ambition of any scientific field: to […]

Traveling interstellar distances in human lifetimes is an amazing dream, but it won’t ever be achieved like this. For centuries, ever since we realized that every star we can see in […]

Simply getting into grad school isn’t enough. The answers to these three questions can make all the difference. It’s time. You’ve done all your research into schools, completed your undergraduate […]

In the mid-20th century, ‘physical cosmology’ was considered an oxymoronic joke. Today, it’s Nobel-winning science. Imagine you wanted to know everything you could about the Universe. You’d want to find […]

If you think that the Moon is only good for reflecting sunlight, you’ve got another think coming. To human eyes, the Moon is the second brightest visible object, trailing only the […]

It’s much more complex a question than dividing its mass by the volume of the event horizon. If you want to get a meaningful answer, you have to go deep. If […]

There’s an enormous evolutionary advantage for flamingos to stand on one leg, but only physics explains why. Of all the natural marvels unique to planet Earth, the diversity of the living […]

Jim Peebles, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz just won the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics. It couldn’t be more well-deserved. Every year, the Nobel Prize reminds all of humanity to […]

It’s not about whether speculating theorists are right; it’s about looking where humanity has never looked before. The Large Hadron Collider, located at CERN, is the most powerful particle accelerator and […]

A recent headline claimed they could. But if gamma-rays are just a form of light, don’t they have to travel at light-speed? There’s an ultimate speed limit in the Universe: […]

Even though it was the crowning achievement of Einstein’s career, he was only a small part of the full story. If you were a physicist in the early 20th century, there […]

We know a lot about what else is out there, but we still don’t know everything. In the quest for life in the Universe, it makes sense to look at […]

There’s so much we don’t know about fast radio bursts and galactic halos. Combined, we get a unique window on the Universe. Deep in space, mysterious signals known as Fast […]

A fully programmable quantum computer that can outperform any classical computer is right at the edge of today’s technology. Earlier this month, a new story leaked out: Google, one of […]

She’s not a scientist, an expert, or even an adult. But she’s got one good lesson to teach us all. Like most people on Earth, Greta Thunberg is not a climate […]

Every object in the Universe is constrained by the laws of physics. Does this mean there are any black holes that shouldn’t exist? When it comes to the objects that […]

If you thought the Planck satellite just made temperature maps of the cosmic microwave background, this will astound you. The Milky Way, to human eyes, appears as simply a mix of […]

With the discovery of the Higgs boson, the Standard Model is now complete. Can we be sure there isn’t another generation of particles out there? The Universe, at a fundamental level, […]

It would be the ultimate method for solving our pollution or hazardous/radioactive waste problems, but we’ll never do it. Here’s why. Imagine our planet as it was for the first 4.55 […]

Maybe, but that probably doesn’t mean what you think it does. Of all the unsolved puzzles in the Universe, perhaps the most confounding is the dark matter problem. If we look […]

The Sudbury neutrino observatory, which was instrumental in demonstrating neutrino oscillations and the massiveness of neutrinos. With additional results from atmospheric, solar, and terrestrial observatories and experiments, we may not […]

It’s a great scientific opportunity of modern times, but we won’t get there with our current observatories. One of the holy grails of modern science is to find a world, […]

As more data comes in, the puzzle gets deeper and deeper. Whenever you set out to solve a problem, there are a series of steps you have to take in order […]

What’s more massive than the heaviest known neutron star but lighter than the lightest known black hole? LIGO may be about to solve that mystery. Whenever a star is born in […]

Is there life beyond Earth, even in our Solar System? This mission might be humanity’s best hope of finding it. The biggest question facing humanity might be, “Does life exists beyond […]