Five diagrams of the surface of the moon, during its phases. Aquatint after Galileo Galilei

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.
An illustration of Star Trek's USS Enterprise in warp drive

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.
Animation of Black Hole Disk Flare in OJ 287

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.
Credits: Frank Summers (STScI), Greg Bacon (STScI), Joseph DePasquale (STScI), Leah Hustak (STScI), Joseph Olmsted (STScI), Alyssa Pagan (STScI); Science by: Steve Finkelstein (UT Austin), Rebecca Larson (RIT), Micaela Bagley (UT Austin)

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.
Martian Moon Deimos

Deimos: A Chip Off the Old Martian Block?

A new space probe suggests that the moonlet Deimos isn’t a captured asteroid after all.
An animation of a cat that shifts between the cat being alive and the cat being dead

Why Do We Love Thinking About Schrödinger’s Cat?

In physics, the whole point of the thought experiment is that it’s absurd. But in literature, it’s been used to explore all sorts of ideas and possibilities.
Computer rendering of the Thirty Meter Telescope

Putting Science in its Place

A new stewardship group for a telescope in Hawai‘i hints at what cooperation between the European scientific tradition and Indigenous knowledge might look like.
From Mundus Subterraneous by Athanasius Kircher, 1641

Where Does Water Come From?

And what does the early modern search for the answer to this question tell us about the “scientific method” we colloquially accept today?
Marshall Islands stick chart, Meddo type

Marshall Islands Wave Charts

Charts constructed of carefully bound sticks served as memory aids, allowing sailors of the Marshall Islands to navigate between the islands by feel.