Zoom image will be displayedThis view shows the full Moon rising over the Marina in San Diego, California in 2014. While the Moon itself may seem like the most mundane of all astronomical sights, one can glean a tremendous amount...
Zoom image will be displayedThe Universe is an amazing place, and the way it came to be today is something very much worth being thankful for. Although our most spectacular pictures of space are rich in galaxies, the majority of...
Zoom image will be displayedNeutrinos and antineutrinos are copious within this Universe, but we can only detect which flavor (electron, muon, or tau) the neutrino is when it interacts with another particle. During the in-between times, when it’s traveling, it’s...
Zoom image will be displayedWhen cooled to low enough temperatures, certain materials will superconduct: the electrical resistance inside them will drop to zero. When exposed to a strong magnetic field, some superconductors will exhibit levitation effects, and with a properly...
Zoom image will be displayedBy examining this strobe image of a bouncing ball, you cannot tell for certain whether the ball is moving toward the right and losing energy with each bounce, or whether it’s moving toward the left and...
Zoom image will be displayedIf you look farther and farther away, you also look farther and farther into the past. If the number of galaxies, the densities and properties of those galaxies, and other cosmic properties like the temperature and...
Zoom image will be displayedWe normally conceive of our Universe as having emerged from a preceding period of cosmic inflation, with our Big Bang occurring where one region of inflating space ceased inflating and transitioned to being dominated by matter...
Zoom image will be displayedFrom anywhere in the Universe, any object that’s in free-fall will have its trajectory determined by the force of gravity: defined by Einstein as the curvature of space. If there were some form of negative mass...
Zoom image will be displayedToday, the Universe has evolved into the complex, life-friendly place we know it to be because we were able to form neutral atoms early on in the Universe. Yet without just the right quantum properties and...
When a gravitational wave passes through a location in space, it causes an expansion and a compression at alternate times in alternate directions, causing laser arm-lengths to change in mutually perpendicular orientations. Exploiting this physical change is how we developed...
