A black hole, even in radio wavelengths alone, will exhibit a large number of different features owing to the bending of light by the curved space surrounding the black hole. Some of the material from behind the black hole, some...
This illustration shows a human colony within a dome on an otherwise uninhabited planet. Humans have often dreamed of colonizing other worlds: both within our Solar System and beyond.(Credit: Corepics VOF/Shutterstock)In all the known Universe, Earth is the only planet...
In a vacuum decay scenario, our Universe exists in a false minimum state, and it’s possible to arrive, either through quantum tunneling or an energetic kick that causes us to leave that state, to enter a true (or truer) vacuum...
In July of 1969, humanity took our first steps on the surface of another world: the Moon. This was the crowning achievement of NASA and the space program in the 1960s, representing a global victory for science and human achievement....
During cosmological inflation, the space contained in the inflationary region grows exponentially, doubling in all three dimensions with each tiny fraction-of-a-second that passes. Where inflation ends, a hot Big Bang ensues. But due to quantum effects, each region where a...
If you held a dime up from a distance of 160 feet (50 meters) away, it would take up more area on the sky than this section of the original Hubble Deep Field image. Several hundred galaxies are visible here,...
The SARS virus (orange) has a crown-like structure, meaning that it’s part of the coronavirus family of diseases. The novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, also known as the virus which causes COVID-19 in humans, is the largest, most lethal and long-term detrimental...
From the main mine that humans made in the Oklo region, one of the natural reactors is accessible via an offshoot, as illustrated here. The large uranium deposit present underwent nuclear fission on and off for hundreds of thousands of...
Around galaxy UGC 00180, a great stellar halo consisting of approximately four billion stars’ worth of matter can be discovered by optimizing this telescopic image for low surface-brightness features. It turns out that a great many galaxies, maybe even all...
Many have already claimed that cosmology is in crisis, and that the Big Bang, and our entire ΛCDM paradigm, has unsound foundations. But the consensus picture not only isn’t so easy to overthrow, but the “crisis” aspect is often greatly...
