Light can travel for billions of years yet experience no time
A photon emitted from a star a billion light-years away arrives at a telescope having experienced no time…
Laser power stations could keep lunar missions running in permanent darkness
Cold, dark crater floors near the Moon’s south pole may hold one of space exploration’s most useful prizes:…
The physics of no return: What actually happens if you get pulled into a black hole
In 1916, only a year after Albert Einstein had published his general theory of relativity, Karl Schwarzschild used…
America’s nuclear spacecraft is heading to Mars, and it’s bringing helicopters
For decades, nuclear propulsion has been a fixture of aerospace engineering proposals and government studies, always promising, never…
Distance in space is an illusion
Andromeda sounds far away because 2.5 million light-years sounds far away. It lands with authority. It feels exact.…
Lightning bolts on Jupiter are up to 100 times stronger than Earth’s
On Jupiter, a storm doesn’t just brew, it can simmer for centuries. The planet’s atmosphere is a perpetual…
Darkness can move faster than light without breaking relativity
A dark point inside a wave of light sounds like a contradiction. It is also something researchers say…
Expanding catalog of black hole collisions is rewriting the history of the universe
Between May 2023 and January 2024, a global network of gravitational-wave detectors picked up 128 new cosmic signals,…
Scientists are rethinking how young galaxies formed their magnetic fields
Magnetic fields that stretch across thousands of light-years should take a very long time to organize. Standard dynamo…
6,800 feet below ground, in the search for dark matter, something has gone very, very cold
Six thousand eight hundred feet below the floor of an active nickel mine in northern Ontario, something has…
Hydrogen atmospheres could keep exomoons habitable for billions of years
There is a category of planet that belongs to no star. It was thrown clear of its solar…
Earth’s distance from the Sun found to dramatically alter seasons
A strip of cool water stretches west from South America along the equator, helping set the pace for…