All SPACE OUT Articles

Ready for an exotic vacation? How about…really exotic? Tired of tropical beaches or snow-covered mountains? Let’s go…out of this world.

Welcome to the era of precision cosmology…where we’ve managed to very precisely measure everything we don't know about the universe.

A long time ago, our universe was dark.It was just 380,000 years after the big bang. Up until that age, our entire observable cosmos was less than a millionth of its present size. All the material in the universe was compressed into that tiny volume, forcing it to heat up and become a plasma. But as the universe expanded and cooled, eventually the plasma changed into a neutral gas as the first atoms formed.

That was worth the wait. Just a quick handful of months since its historic launch on Christmas Day, the James Webb Space Telescope has flown to its observing position, unfolded its delicate instruments and ultra-sized mirror, and run through a suite of checks and alignments and calibrations. The team at NASA behind the telescopes released their first batch of images from the science runs, and besides being gorgeous, they're powerful.

What if there was another you, somewhere out there, doing all the things you wished you could’ve done? What if there was a multiverse, where all the possibilities and choices of our lives became real? It seems like just another fantasy of science fiction, but it’s closer to reality than you might think.

Space hotels may be in our future.

Beyond the most distant star you can see with the naked eye, beyond the most extreme faint galaxy that we discern with our telescopes, lays something extraordinary: the leftover light from the big bang itself.

Einstein was the first to explain the force of gravity as warps and dents in the fabric of spacetime. He was also the first to realize that those warps and dents can make waves – literal waves of gravity. But he didn’t think we would ever get to measure them, because they would be so tiny.

To date, we know of over 5,000 planets outside the solar system. And astronomers suspect that there may be *checks notes* around a trillion more in our galaxy alone. The search for exoplanets is one of the hottest topics in astronomy, with expensive telescopes and giant collaborations all searching for the holy grail of the 21st century: an Earth 2.0, a habitable world like our own.

There are pulsars, and then there are binary pulsars, and then there are black widow pulsars. Because why can’t nature just stop?

Recently NASA’s DART mission succeeded in its primary goal, which was to slam a spacecraft face-first into an asteroid. For science. The intention of the mission was to test if we could actually redirect an asteroid and send it into a different orbit. But how and when will we know if it worked?

In 2018 the Japanese space agency sent the Hayabusa2 mission to the asteroid Ryugu, As a part of that mission, the spacecraft blasted material off the surface of the asteroid, put it in a bottle, and sent it back to Earth. Two years later that sample landed in the western deserts of Australia.

It’s the ultimate galactic showdown. The wrestling match to end all wrestling matches. A cosmic collision of epic proportions. And you won’t want to miss it.

We can debate the status of objects in the solar system all day long, arguing if little Pluto is a planet or not. But to tell you the truth, any planet in any solar system got the short end of the stick. The real winners of the galactic game are the travelers, the roamers, the rogue planets.

In our annual New Year’s family tradition of struggling to stay awake until midnight, we decided to watch “Don’t Look Up,” the Adam McKay satire starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, and other fabulously good-looking people.