The universe is precisely 13.8 billion year old - or so our best scientific methods tell us. But how do you learn the age of the universe when there’s no trace left of its beginnings?

At just four light years away, Proxima Centauri is our closest solar neighbor. The recent discovery of the new exoplanet Proxima D, has reopened the discussion of whether the proxima system is our best chance at reaching another Earth....

When we detected the very first gravitational wave, a new window was opened to the mysteries of the universe. We knew we’d see things previously thought impossible. And we just did - an object on the boundary between neutron stars and...

A new white dwarf has been discovered (poetically named: ZTF J1901+1458) that’s doing some stuff that no white dwarf should ever be able to do. In fact, it has multiple properties that are so extreme that it almost certainly did NOT form...

Our solar system is a tiny bubble of habitability suspended in a vast universe that mostly wants to kill us. In fact, a good fraction of our own galaxy turns out to be utterly uninhabitable, even for sun—like stellar systems. Is this why...

The moment you started observing reality, you hopelessly polluted any conclusions you might make about it. The anthropic principle guarantees that you are NOT seeing the universe in most typical state. But used correctly, this highly...

Whenever we open a new window on the universe, we discover things that no one expected. Our newfound ability to measure ripples in the fabric of spacetime—gravitational waves—is a very new window, and so far we’ve seen a lot of wild...

Niels Bohr, a Danish Physicist said “Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded .” Is what we see perceived to be real or is it an illusion?

In the world of our mind’s eye, light travels in a straight line....

Black holes are really only dangerous if you get too close. Ha, who am I kidding. It turns out they may be responsible for ending star formation across the entire universe.
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When we first realized that black holes could have...

Throughout history, there has been much speculation about what the fate of the universe would be. Many theorized that the universe would eventually succumb to the pull of gravity, and reverse its expansion in what was being called ‘The...

In astronomy we study things that are very far away. It’s a powerful challenge because even the brightest objects are almost impossibly faint when you view them from the other side of the universe. But there’s an up side. If the light...

It may be that for every star in the universe there are billions of microscopic black holes streaming through the solar system, the planet, even our bodies every second. Sounds horrible - but hey, at least we’d have explained dark matter.

The Most Unbelievable Image Ever Captured by Hubble Space Telescope

It never gets dark anymore. Not REALLY dark, anyway. Not like it used to. Light pollution is not only making it more difficult to see the night sky, but it's also affecting our health. For the past century and a half, since the dawn of...

You have questions, I have answers! In this edition of Ask Joe Stuff, you'll find out what the date really is according to Earth's age, why we get chills up our spine, what my favorite planet is, why hair grows (or doesn't), and why root...

Earth has seasons, but what about the rest of the planets in the solar system? Let’s take a tour from Mercury to Pluto and see what seasons would be like on all our planetary neighbors. Bring a sweater!

We’ve been failing to detect dark matter for decades. Finally, the latest failure to detect dark matter may have actually proved its existence. One of these is true: either most of the matter in the universe is invisible and formed of...

EVER WANTED TO WEIGH A FART? Well, it isn't easy, but Gabe from PBS Space Time walks us through the math, physics, and science behind farts and explains how to measure them!

The possibility that a black hole could actually impact Earth may seem straight out of science fiction, but the reality is that microscopic primordial black holes could actually hit Earth. If one did, it wouldn't just impact like an...

Good news everyone: it looks like the universe is going to end with a series of catastrophic explosions. The very, very long story short is that the universe ends in heat death, as it approaches maximum entropy, and its eternal...

Since the 1950s, governments, companies, and researchers have been planting flags among the stars. But while it might seem like there's plenty of room in space, some pieces of celestial real estate are more valuable than others. As far...

Over the past few years, astronomers have discovered their own kind of UFO called Odd Radio Circles, aka ORCs. They're a little too round, and a little too invisible at non-radio wavelengths, to immediately know what they are and...

Hunting for rogue planets is like hunting for an invisible needle in a haystack. But we're getting a much clearer view thanks to gravitational microlensing surveys. And it looks like there are a LOT more of them out there than we thought.

With an effective surface temperature of roughly 5,500 degrees Celsius, you might think water couldn't survive on the Sun. Well, scientists debated whether or not it was there for nearly a century, and it turns out, it can!