All SPACE OUT Articles

Sure, the Moon is cool to look at, and fun to think about it. And it literally affects us here on the Earth: without the Moon, we’d be missing half our tides, and likely our planet’s rotation wouldn’t be as stable as it is.

Gold had to come to Earth from somewhere, right? So why not outer space?

Every star you see in the sky, including the sun, will someday die. It’s best to get used to that idea now, before things start to get heavy.

Exoplanets are planets orbiting stars outside the solar system, and every month seems to bring in a new batch of weird, wild, and wonderful worlds.

Ten years ago scientists at the Large Hadron Collider had finally found evidence for the elusive Higgs boson, a particle that plays a central role in physics. And since then…we haven’t found much.

The European Space Agency’s Gaia spacecraft has managed to watch stars tremble, their light subtly changing as starquakes ripple through their surfaces. Which is pretty cool, because Gaia wasn’t even designed to do it.

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.

Sometimes you just know. Something clicks, you have a realization that this relationship isn’t right, and it’s simply time to go. It can happen to anyone, at any time, even to planets, and even billions of years ago.

Let’s say one day astronomers announce that our worst nightmare has come true: a large object is headed towards the Earth with a significant chance of impact. What do we do?

You all have that person in your life. One minute they have you in stitches. The next they’re driving you nuts. You want to let go of this person but you just can’t…and the next day, you wish you never had the thought.You’re not alone, and what happens at the human level also happens at the cosmic level.

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.

First, some background. A huge collaboration of astronomers is currently busy spending some hard-won cash to build the world’s largest radio telescope array, called the Square Kilometre Array.

The 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics is being awarded to scientists to have dedicated their careers to the study of black holes.

All planets with evidence of life please take a step forward. Not so fast, Venus.

Does the presence of a stinky gas mean there was once life on Venus?