This illustration shows a hypothetical ring around the Earth, which could represent a particle accelerator even larger than the Earth’s circumference. With approximately ~1500 times the radius of the Large Hadron Collider, such an accelerator, even with only slightly more...
Here on Earth, in the gravitational field of our planet, there is no way to “shield” ourselves from the gravitational influence of Earth, as there are no gravitationally negative charges/masses/forms of energy. This closed room experiences free-fall conditions, where the...
A view from above of the BES III detector at the electron-positron collider in Beijing, China. Exotic particles have newly been detected here, including X, Y, and Z mesons which don’t fit the normal scheme of a quark-antiquark combination. With...
This region of space, viewed first iconically by Hubble and later by JWST, shows an animation that switches between the two. Both images still have fundamental limitations, as they were acquired from within our inner Solar System, where the presence...
If you take a 1 kg mass and place it on the surface of the Earth, it will register 2.2 pounds (9.8 newtons) on a scale. That same mass, on Mars, will have only ~38% of its Earth weight, even...
That the Universe exists and that we are here to observe it tells us a lot. It enables us to place constraints on various parameters, and to the infer the existence of states and reactions that present themselves as gaps...
The expanding Universe, full of galaxies and the complex structure we observe today, arose from a smaller, hotter, denser, more uniform state. Although the extent of the observable Universe, today, takes us out some 46 billion light-years in all directions,...
Today, 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, the formation of stable, neutral...
Intelligent aliens, if they exist in the galaxy or the Universe, might be detectable from a variety of signals: electromagnetic, from planet modification, or because they’re spacefaring. But we haven’t found any evidence for an inhabited alien planet so far....
Artist’s logarithmic scale conception of the observable universe. The Solar System gives way to the Milky Way, which gives way to nearby galaxies which then give way to the large-scale structure and the hot, dense plasma of the Big Bang...
