The biggest news in cosmology in recent years is that the mysterious universe-accelerating entity we call dark energy may be fading away. The evidence for this is now strong enough that enormous effort is going into confirming this...

The holy grail of theoretical physics is to find the long-sought theory of quantum gravity. But what if this theory is as mythical as the grail of legend? What if gravity isn’t weirdly quantum at all, but rather … just a bit messy? Or...

Warp drives may or may not be possible, but if they are then could a distant alien civilization’s warp fields produce gravitational waves that we could see here on Earth? According to a recent study.. Actually maybe, at least eventually....

We’re almost certainly the first technological civilization on Earth. But what if we’re not? We are. Although how sure are we, really? The Silurian hypothesis, which asks whether pre-human industrial civilizations might have existed.

To understand where we came from—how earth, the solar system, the galaxy became what they are today—we need to understand the beginning of time. For example, how did the first galaxies pull themselves together from the dark...

A few weeks ago a large team of gravitational wave astronomers announced something pretty wild. The moderately confident detection of pervasive ripples in the fabric of space time that presumably fills the cosmos, detected by watching...

We may have planet-shattering asteroids to thank for the origin of life on Earth.

The James Webb Telescope just took a photo of a newly discovered exoplanet. Exciting stuff but the raw image just looks like a small, faint dot—not a fully detailed world. The question is, just how big would a telescope need to be to...

Over 200 years ago, scientists were looking at sunlight through a prism when they noticed that part of the rainbow was missing. There were dark lines where there should have been colors. Since then, scientists have unlocked the secrets...

Where did life come from? It’s one of the biggest questions humans have ever asked — and the answer might be locked in ancient space rocks that were around before life began. To find out, NASA pulled off one of its most ambitious...

We know pollution is a problem on earth, but we’re filling space with our junk too. And if we don’t figure out a way to clean up space junk, we could end our interstellar dreams before they even get started. Today, we’re visiting some...

Since the time of the ancient Greeks, scientists have been constructing a cosmic measuring tape to measure the universe from our own backyard all the way to its ever-expanding edge: the cosmic distance ladder. In this video, we climb...

In 1995, a few years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, a top-secret, first-of-its-kind US spy satellite program was declassified, leading to the unexpected story of how former enemies would become scientific allies, and technology...

In March 2025, astronomers announced the "largest cosmic structure discovered to date". They called it Quipu. And Quipu is just the latest entry in a list of structures that are too big for cosmologists to explain without revisiting one...

If all goes well, we'll be sending astronauts back to the Moon in just a couple of years. And scientists have a lot to figure out before then, including the answer to a seemingly simple question: What time is it up there? Hosted by:...

Where is the closest black hole to Earth? Well, they're pretty hard to find, so the record-holder keeps getting updated. Currently, it's an unassuming black hole called Gaia BH1. But research has hinted at several black holes that might...

Let's say goodbye to 2024 by highlighting some amazing space images that were released this year. They aren't just pretty — astronomers can actually study them to learn more about the universe! Hosted by: Niba Audrey @NotesbyNiba (she/her)

Astronomers have two main ways to calculate how fast the universe is expanding. Unfortunately, they don't agree with one another. The JWST was supposed to help solve this discrepancy, known as "The Hubble Tension" or "The Crisis in...

Hollywood (and other fictional media) loves to show people dying in outer space. And it has several go-to causes of death, on a sliding scale of accuracy. But it turns out, reality has some ways to kill you that are far stranger than...

In November 2023, NASA's Lucy spacecraft flew by the asteroid Dinkinesh and made a startling discovery: not only does this small asteroid have an even smaller companion (named Selam), that companion is shaped like a two-tier snowman....

Perfectly packing your suitcase for a trip may require more physics and math than you think. Here's when to crumple your clothes in the bag and shove it down, iron and fold everything, or roll it up using CleanTok hacks. Hosted by: Hank...

In 2024, astronomers announced they'd discovered the brightest (or, technically, the most luminous) object in the known universe. And it's a cosmic engine powered by the hungriest black hole in the known universe. Hosted by: Stefan Chin...

From hypothetical magnetic levitation trains and space elevators that aren't even attached to the ground, to very real space cannons tested in the 1960s, humans have come up with a lot of ways to hurl stuff into outer space. Hosted by:...

Why do we have wisdom teeth? They're just going to come in wrong and cause problems. Wisdom teeth are a souvenir from our early human ancestors, and we actually understand less about them than you might think. Hosted by: Reid Reimers...