Could You Stand on the Surface of Jupiter? Exploring the Enigmatic Outer Planets
The outer planets’ clouds hide the weirdness within.
How Plate Tectonics Shook Life into Existence
The cycles of life all rely on the dynamism of the Earth’s crust.
The Carrington Event of 1859 Disrupted Telegraph Lines. A “Miyake Event” Would Be Far Worse
We don't know what causes Miyake events, but these great surges of energy can help us understand the past—while posing a threat to our future.
“Ghostly” Neutrinos Help Us See Our Milky Way as Never Before
As Marcel Proust said, “The real voyage of discovery...consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
We Might Have Accidentally Killed the Only Life We Ever Found on Mars Nearly 50 Years Ago
In one experiment, the Viking landers added water to Martian soil samples. That might have been a very bad idea.
1610: Dawn of the Extraterrestrial
Galileo's telescopic view of the Moon sparked a giant transformation in the way human beings thought about the natural world.
How Rocks and Minerals Play with Light to Produce Breathtaking Colors
Rocks and minerals don’t simply reflect light. They play with it and interact with light as both a wave and a particle.
Is Star Trek’s Warp Drive Possible?
The concept of the warp drive is currently at odds with everything we know to be true about physics.
Solved: Astronomers Identify Origin of Mysterious Flares in Galaxy OJ 287
In a distant galaxy, a cosmic dance between two supermassive black holes emits periodic flashes of light.
NASA’s Deepest 3D Fly-through of the Universe
From the present day all the way to less than 400 million years after the Big Bang, we're seeing how the Universe grew up like never before.