Not long after the supernova of 1604, the telescope was invented. But astronomers would have to wait nearly FOUR CENTURIES to witness the next supernova that was visible to the naked eye. It was 1987, and a blue supergiant in the Large...

This video is about the differences between the corpses or final degenerate dense star forms that dead stars take: black holes, neutron stars, and white dwarfs. The main distinguishing features between them are the mass cutoffs...

Why is it Hot Underground

Plate Tectonics Explained

Stars have cores hot and dense enough to force atomic nuclei together, forming larger, heavier nuclei in a process known as fusion. In this process, the mass of the end products is slightly less than the mass of the initial atoms. But...

Unlike Earth, our Sun is a giant ball of mostly hydrogen and helium. Astronomers managed to figure that one out roughly 100 years ago. But after all this time, they still can't come to an agreement on what "mostly" means, precisely.

For years, geologists have been searching for an explanation for two strange blobs of Earth's mantle that are denser than the rest. It turns out, they may not be original parts of Earth at all.

Unfortunately, the universe isn't made of sugarcoated fried dough. However, here are a few ways donuts are still managing to find their way into the physical world.

Supernovae are only rare to the passive stargazer, but if you’re an astronomer studying them, you get to see some of the most brilliant explosions in the universe. Here are five of the most significant supernovae known to science.

While doing some light reading of data from a telescope, Conny Aerts made a breakthrough that allowed her to lead the charge in the field of asteroseismology and win her the 2022 Kavli Prize in Astrophysics.

2022 was a pretty exciting year for space science, but what news might we expect in the coming year?

Neutron stars, are some of the most extreme phenomenon in the universe. It's doubly so for a subset known as pulsars. Some are spinning so fast, and are so massive, that astronomers aren't entirely sure how they got to be that way. One...

Our galaxy is full of dysfunctional stellar relationships. With more than half of all stars existing in binary orbits, it’s inevitable that many stellar remnants will end up in parasitic spirals with their partners. Today we’re going to...

Einstein once asked whether “the moon exists only when I look at it?". It was rhetorical objection to the idea that measurement in quantum mechanics causes reality to become real. But there was a time when the moon didn’t exist, and then...

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...

Earth’s magnetic field protects us from deadly space radiation. What if it were drastically weakened, as a precursor to flipping upside down? I mean, it has before … many, many times..

Spaceship Earth has a literal deflector...

If the sun instantly switched off like a light bulb–which can’t happen, by the way–then we wouldn’t know for almost 8 and a half minutes. Light travels at the fastest speed there is, but it still takes almost 500 seconds to get to Earth....

A hydrogen atom is traveling high within the outermost layer of Earth's atmosphere. This particular atom first entered the exosphere millions of years ago, but today it overcomes Earth's gravitational pull and escapes, joining the...

One Minute Physics provides an energetic and entertaining view of old and new problems in physics -- all in one minute!

Hank takes us on a journey to center of the Earth to explain both how the solid core formed and why it is so important for life as we know it.

Improving batteries is a tough problem, but it’s also an important one because in many ways the future of our planet also depends on the future of batteries. Luckily, scientists are on the case, figuring out ways to give this essential...

From poking their own eyes, to drinking a patient's vomit, some extremely passionate scientists have done pretty outrageous things to themselves in the name of science.

3 Surprising Things Matter Does Under Extreme Pressure

Scientific discovery often dabbles in the extreme, challenging and exceeding what we think of as "possible." And this year's discoveries were no different! We present to you three scientific discoveries made this year that set out to...