Astronomy
NASA Tightbeams a Cat Video From 31 Million Kilometers Away
NASA's Deep Space Network (DSN) has been responsible for maintaining contact with missions venturing beyond Low Earth Orbit (LEO) since…
Watch 14 Years of Gamma-Ray Observations in This Fascinating NASA Video
The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, named in honor of noted physicist Enrico Fermi, has been in operation for almost a…
Holograms Might Save Physics
Even though the guts of General Relativity are obtusely mathematical, and for decades was relegated to math departments rather than…
Ouch. Canadarm2 Took a Direct Hit From a Micrometeorite
Living in space comes with risks. For astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS), those risks occasionally make themselves intrusively…
Should We Be Preparing for First Contact?
First Contact. It's a topic guaranteed to inspire a mix of emotions in people. It's also one of the most…
Lost In Space? Just Use Relativity
One of the hardest things for many people to conceptualize when talking about how fast something is going is that…
We Just had the Strongest Solar Flare in the Current Solar Cycle
On December 14th, at 12:02 PM Eastern (09:02 AM Pacific), the Sun unleashed a massive solar flare. According to the…
Why the Universe Might be a Hologram
A quarter century ago, physicist Juan Maldacena proposed the AdS/CFT correspondence, an intriguing holographic connection between gravity in a three-dimensional…
The Strangest Coincidence in Physics: The AdS/CFT Correspondence
Attempts to turn string theory into a workable theory of nature have led to the potential conclusion that our universe…
Can Webb Find the First Stars in the Universe?
The Universe's very first stars had an important job. They formed from the primordial elements created by the Big Bang,…