They stream through your body by the trillion every second, yet you will never see one, touch one, or feel one. For most of the history of physics, these “ghost particles” were little more than a mathematical whisper, a speculative fix to a puzzle about missing energy. Now, in the early twenty–first century, scientists ...
On a wind-bitten summit in northern Chile, a new eye has opened and the sky has started to move. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory – freshly outfitted with the world’s largest astronomical camera – has shifted from a dream to a working machine, capturing its first on-sky images in 2024 and pushing into an intense ...
For more than a century, astronomers have been measuring how quickly the universe is flying apart, quietly assuming that with better telescopes and cleaner data, all the numbers would eventually agree. Instead, the opposite is happening. New observations, from ultra-precise space telescopes to clever uses of exploding stars and gravitational waves, are sharpening a ...
Imagine looking up at the night sky and realizing that everything you see – every galaxy, every star, even your own sense of self – might be the three‑dimensional “shadow” of information written on a distant cosmic surface. That is the unsettling, exhilarating idea behind the holographic universe hypothesis, a theory that started at ...
On warm August nights, the heavens put on a show far grander than any firework display. The Perseid meteor shower, famous for its fast, bright streaks, is about to peak. But in 2025, stargazers face a challenge: a bright waning gibbous Moon rising just as the shower reaches its height. The cosmic puzzle is simple—how ...
You look up at the sky on a clear, dark night and see that glowing river of stars stretching across the darkness. It’s beautiful, right? Familiar, even. You probably think you know the Milky Way. You’ve heard about it since grade school. Turns out, we’ve all been looking at a much stranger place than we ...
For centuries, the heavens have been a pattern of twinkling lights, far-off galaxies, and the occasional comet flying overhead across the blackness. But between the stars is something much more mysterious vast, invisible clumps of gas, floating unseen across the universe. Now astronomers have revealed one of these hidden giants, a huge crescent-shaped molecular hydrogen ...
Think you know everything about our cosmic neighborhood? You probably studied the planets in elementary school, memorized their order from the Sun, and maybe even built a model solar system for a science fair. Yet there’s a whole universe of jaw-dropping information that textbooks rarely mention. From storms that have been raging for centuries to ...
The deeper we look into the universe, the stranger it becomes. Every new space telescope image, every gravitational wave detection, every particle collision seems to answer one question while quietly smuggling in three more. Astrophysicists are mapping black holes, measuring the echo of the Big Bang, and tracking stars that move like bullets through ...
Space has always been humanity’s greatest mystery playground. You look up at the night sky and wonder what secrets lie beyond our tiny blue marble. Our solar system alone contains enough bizarre phenomena to keep scientists scratching their heads for centuries. From planets spinning the wrong way to storms shaped like giant hexagons, the cosmic ...
