Inside a Black Hole, Gravity Stops Being a Force and Becomes Geometry
From Karl Schwarzschild's battlefield equations to the first photograph of M87's shadow — how black holes went from mathematical curiosity to observed reality.
Journal
Journal
We've Found Six Thousand Worlds We Never Knew About
From pulsars to hot Jupiters to Earth-sized worlds in habitable zones — how we discovered 6,000+ exoplanets and what their atmospheres reveal.
Dead Stars That Tick Like Clocks and Outlast Civilizations
A collapsed star the size of a city, spinning hundreds of times per second, keeping time more precisely than atomic clocks. How pulsars work.
Mars Isn't Actually Red — We've Been Seeing It Wrong
Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS If you stood on Mars right now, you would not see the planet you think you know. The red marble from your school...
Most of the Universe Is Missing — We Still Can't Find It
Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, CXC Eighty-five percent of all the matter in the universe is something we have never seen, never touched, never caught...
The Universe Is Expanding at Two Different Speeds — And Both Are Right
Image: ESA and the Planck Collaboration Two teams of physicists have spent more than a decade measuring the same number. They are using the best...
We Thought We'd Found Aliens — It Was a Dead Star Ticking
Image: NASA/CXC/SAO Somewhere in the northern sky, a collapsed star the size of a city is spinning on its axis once every 1.337 seconds. It...
Some Craters on the Moon Haven't Seen Sunlight in 4 Billion Years
Image: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University Imagine a place 240,000 miles from where you sit right now. The temperature has dropped to minus 248 degrees Celsius: colder...
Pluto Got Demoted Because Its Own Neighborhood Betrayed It
Image: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute You grew up with nine planets. You learned their names in order, probably to a mnemonic,...