All SPACE OUT Articles

First, take a bunch of matter. It doesn’t matter what kind – a piece of paper, some leftover gum. Then, press it, and press it, and press it some more. Don’t stop now! We’ve got a long way to go.

If Kevin Costner wanted to make a sequel, he’s got plenty of opportunities. Water is by far the most common molecule in the universe. It’s made of two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen. Hydrogen is element number 1 (both on the period table and in abundance), and has been hanging around since the first 15 minutes of the Big Bang. Oxygen is forged in the hearts of sun-like stars, and spreads around when those stars die and turn themselves inside out. And since sun-like stars are also very popular, oxygen gets quite a boost.

30 years--It’s been over 30 years since the Voyager 2’s historic flyby of Uranus and Neptune, the outermost and most mysterious planets in the solar system. It’s time to go back.

So the astronomers called it “FarFarOut”, which is mostly a joke because the last time they found such a distant object it they nicknamed it “FarOut”, and this new world is much, much, farther out.

Headline after headline is sharing the exciting news: a pair of theoretical physicists have realized that our sci-fi dreams may be real: it may be possible to build an actual, operational warp drive. One problem: it doesn’t go all that fast.

From the exotic to the just plain odd, our solar system is home to some of the most extreme worlds in the galaxy. But I’m not talking about the planets, I’m talking about their moons. Let’s take a look at the most strange...

ID2299, a galaxy 13.8 billion light years away, died far too young.

Meet TYC 7037-89-1, a six-star solar system. Astrophysicist Paul M. Sutter explains this stellar surprise discovery.

Our little silicon friends have been exploring the harshest environments in the universe - space itself - in humanity’s name for decades. And while tales of their robotic exploits could fill an entire book, let’s count down the top five.

Things are getting a little crowded at the red planet.

The internet and news media alike are abuzz with news about a radio buzz coming from Proxima Centauri, the nearest neighbor star to our sun a mere four and a quarter light-years away. That star happens to host a planet, called Proxima b (because we don’t have a cooler name for it yet), that sits in the habitable zone of its parent star. That means that the planet can potentially host liquid water, and where there’s liquid water there’s a chance for life.

Using a network of dead stars, astronomers get closer to seeing the background ripples of the universe.

It was all supposed to be great. On January 16th, NASA performed its first major test run in a long, long time. It was a test for the core stage of its upcoming Space Launch System (SLS), a beast of a rocket that will carry astronauts to the Moon, Mars, and more.

You would think that objects weighing billions of times the mass of the sun would be easy to find. Alas, it’s rarely that simple.

There aren’t a lot of telescopes that are also movie stars. In fact, I can think of only one: the famed Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico.