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Astrophysics
We've now detected hundreds of gravitational waves with LIGO, Virgo, and KAGRA. What if we tried Weber's original method in the modern day?
Stellar streams are faint trails of stars that appear to "stream" out of galaxies. A new one, escaping galaxy M61, may point to many others.
When dying, Sun-like stars have binary companions, spectacular sights arise from the ionization. JWST spots the Red Spider Nebula in action!
There's some, but not overwhelming, evidence that dark energy is evolving. What would it take for a "Big Crunch" to be our cosmic fate?
Physicist Daniel Whiteson challenges the notion that all intelligent species would eventually uncover the same laws of nature. Do you agree?
Nearly 100 years after being theorized, the strange behavior of the neutrino still mystifies us. They could be even stranger than we know.
The planet, the Solar System, and the galaxy aren't expanding. But the whole Universe is. So where does the dividing line begin?
For 13.8 billion years, the Universe has been expanding. But that couldn't have been the case for an eternity, and science has proven it.
Red dwarfs are the Universe's most common star type. Their flaring now makes potentially Earth-like worlds uninhabitable, but just you wait.
Found by Hubble before JWST's launch, GNz7q looked like a mix of a galaxy and a quasar. Was it actually our first known "little red dot"?
Observations with the Hubble space telescope helped cement dark energy and reveal the Hubble tension. How are these two things so different?
Inflation's two main criticisms, that it can predict anything and that the "measure problem" remains unsolved, can't erase its successes.
Our Sun only arose after 9.2 billion years of cosmic history: with many stars living and dying first. How many prior generations were there?
By deeply imaging a large volume of space, COSMOS-Web provides JWST's widest cosmic views. Its gravitational lenses reveal a big surprise.
As the Universe ages, it continues to gravitate, form stars, and expand. And yet, all this will someday end. Do we finally understand how?
23mins
"Could black holes be the key to a quantum theory of gravity, a deeper theory of how reality, of how space and time works? Well, I think so."
As October begins, thousands of longtime NASA employees are leaving the agency. 4000+ will exit by January 9, 2026, changing NASA forever.
From the Big Bang to a prior period of cosmic inflation, our cosmic origins are clearer than ever. Yet these 5 big mysteries still remain.
If you think of the Big Bang as an explosion, we can trace it back to a single point-of-origin. But what if it happened everywhere at once?
Big Think spoke with astronomer David Kipping about technosignatures, "extragalactic SETI," and being a popular science communicator in the YouTube age.
Dust is ubiquitous in the modern Universe, appearing in nearly all galaxies. But our cosmos was born dust-free. So where does it originate?
In this excerpt from "Facing Infinity," Jonas Enander examines how John Michell conceived of "dark stars," or massive bodies with enough gravity to trap light, all the way back in 1783.
JWST isn't the first telescope to peer into this factory of star-birth some 5500 light-years away, but its views are the most educational.
Going back to 1990, we hadn't even found one planet outside of our Solar System. As we close in on 6000, we now see many of them directly.
11mins
"We're stuck at type zero. But what would it take to move between universes? What would it take to enter a black hole? What would it take to break the light barrier?"
With several seemingly incompatible observations, cosmology faces many puzzles. Could early, supermassive stars be the unified solution?
The Universe isn't just expanding; the expansion is accelerating. If different methods yield incompatible results, is dark energy evolving?
10 years ago, LIGO saw its first gravitational wave. After 218 detections, our view of black holes has changed forever. Can this era endure?
Designed to map galaxies, the SPHEREx mission's first science result is instead about interstellar interloper 3I/ATLAS. No, it's not aliens.
Science helps us imagine the vastness of space and time — and our small but meaningful place within it.