All Space Articles

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

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.

NASA sent a spacecraft on a mission to crash into an asteroid, so how did it go?Updated 9/26/22

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 this podcast, Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer discuss the following stories to help you get smarter and learn something new in just a few minutes:

Our universe is home to up to two trillion galaxies, with each galaxy hosting hundreds of billions of stars. That’s…a lot of stars. Each one a ball of fearsome energies, powered by the nuclear fusion of fundamental elements in their hearts. Each one pouring out light into the empty cosmos, illuminating our universe for our wonder and delight.

Sure, the sun looks all calm up there in the sky. Kids even put little smiley faces on the sun when they draw it. But look closer and you’ll find that our sun has a nasty, violent temper.

Winchcombe is the sort of quiet English market town where life trundles along unremarkably day after day. So when a meteorite landed in the middle of a housing estate on the evening of February 28, 2021 it caused a rare and unexpected sensation.

How does Santa make it to all the children in the world in one night? Can flying reindeer travel at the speed of light?Dive into the physics behind this Christmas tale.

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.

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.

Super Earths are super cool, and you should really know about them. In short, they are planets slightly bigger than the Earth (hence the name). And the cool part? They might be a home for life, and they’re way easier to study than regular Earths.

We’ve all heard the story of the first Thanksgiving, but this meal – and life itself, if we’re being honest – wouldn’t be possible without the elements themselves. And those elements took a long journey to end up on your dinner plate.

On May 22, Virgin Galactic’s first human spaceflight successfully launched into space from Spaceport America, New Mexico. Mothership, VMS Eve, the carrier and launch platform for the VSS Unity SpaceShipTwo spacecraft, carried VSS Unity to 44,000 feet in the air and then released it as the spaceship began a rocket powered flight to the edge of space.

Folks, we just found a 500-lightyear-wide hole in our galaxy. Fess up: which one of you did it?