SCIENCE

The fundamental building blocks of reality are indivisible: quanta that cannot be split or divided. Our understanding remains incomplete.Continue reading on Starts With A Bang! » Source link...

This illustration shows a spacetime grid where the grid is being dragged due to rotation, but where expansion farther out causes gridlines to stream away from the center. In the far future, when only black holes remain in a dark...

At the high temperatures achieved in the very young Universe, not only can particles and photons be spontaneously created, given enough energy, but also antiparticles and unstable particles as well, resulting in a primordial particle-and-antiparticle soup. Yet even with these...

A planet that is a candidate for being inhabited will no doubt experience catastrophes, collisions, and extinction-level events on it, particularly during its early stages. If life is to survive and thrive on a world, it must possess the right...

This image of Earth at night highlights the power of how different features are visible as the planet rotates about its axis from afar. Even though night lighting would not be detectable with foreseeable technology were Earth an exoplanet, there...

As long as there are still interactions occurring between objects in space, including gravitational collapse, nuclear transitions, stellar cataclysms, and anything that emits radiation of any type, our Universe will not be in the lowest-energy, maximum-entropy, equilibrium state. In the...

At the start of the hot Big Bang, the Universe was rapidly expanding and filled with high-energy, very densely packed, ultra-relativistic quanta. An early stage of radiation domination gave way to several later stages where radiation was sub-dominant, but never...

Einstein, contrary to the popular narrative, wasn’t a lone genius, but rather only achieved the successes that he did because of his friends, colleagues, professors, and the larger community of physicists, astronomers, and mathematicians that he was a part of....

This visualization shows the three main components of the Egg Nebula, with all of the foreground and background stars removed. The concentric thin rings of material represent pulsed ejecta from the dying star in its post-AGB phase. The twin jets...

Carl Sagan was one of the most prominent scientific figures of the 20th century, helping cofound the now-thriving field of planetary science and popularizing physics and astronomy for a generation of adults and children. His “baloney detection kit” remains, even...