Human exploration of the universe is progressing at an exciting pace, with regular advancements in the tools we use to study black holes, stars, quasars, and much more. Dive into some of the most mind-blowing observations and theories about physical reality with our curated resources on the physics of celestial objects.
Hours of research by our editors, distilled into minutes of clarity.
The sun is our biggest source of heat and light, but how does this massive powerhouse continue to produce such amazing energy? Basically, it's a fusion reactor. At its core the sun produces all that solar energy through hydrogen fusing and converting into helium, over and over again. Learn more about the entire amazing and explosive process here.
A timeline for everything, from the Big Bang to the beginnings of life on Earth. This article lays out, in spans of billions of years, what was happening in the universe as it became the universe. Starting from the Planck era, the earliest known meaningful time, to the probable "Big Crunch" 30 billion years from now, see how the universe has existed and persisted.
Here's a quick rundown on black hole basics, the cosmic enigmas digesting massive swaths of the universe and destabilizing our fundamental ideas of space, time, and matter. Learn how they got their name, what happens in the unfortunate instance you fall into one, and more with this list of 13 questions about black holes.
Quanta Magazine provides a deep dive into black holes and the black hole information paradox. For a very long time it was believed nothing could escape a black hole. Therein lies the paradox. Per quantum mechanics, whatever falls into a black hole should not necessarily be lost forever, and may eventually return. In a landmark series of calculations, physicists have proved that black holes can shed information.
Think you know everything about black holes? You might be surprised. Thought of as massive vacuum cleaners sucking up everything in their cosmic path, black holes actually accrete matter at an incredibly slow pace. Yet, some black holes existed when the universe was only a few billion years young. Learn more in this BBC report.
Depth perception is hard to achieve when looking out into space. For decades, two camps of astrophysicists have disagreed over the nature of the North Polar Spur, a radio-wave emitting arc above the Milky Way galaxy's plane. Was it close and relatively small? Or was it faraway and much more massive? New research utilizing X-ray mapping of the galaxy has helped clarify the existence of both so-called smaller Fermi bubbles and larger X-ray ones.
Dr Farzana Meru, assistant professor and planetary scientist, shares how planets come to be in this interview. Protoplanetary discs are swirling, dusty, and gaseous formations that form and revolve around stars. Some 4,000 extra-solar planets have already been discovered, and through these protoplanetary discs more are on the way.
New data garnered from European spacecraft Gaia in 2018 allowed astronomers to rewrite the Milky Way Galaxy's biography. Charting the movements of more than 1 billion stars, Gaia made astronomers reassess how our galaxy formed. Evidence of long-ago collisions and proof of unexpected and unusual movements were just the beginning of the beginning.
Black holes in the modern sense were first predicted as a consequence of Einstein’s general theory of relativity. These objects are so dense, they are surrounded by a boundary called an event horizon; anything crossing that boundary can never return to the outside universe. Despite their ubiquity and large mass, black holes are relatively small in size meaning even our best telescopes can’t take images of them— at least when working alone. The EHT yokes multiple telescopes together, giving it the resolution necessary to take an image of the supermassive black hole in the giant elliptical galaxy M87.
Archaeologists reconstruct the history of previous civilizations. Researchers in the new field of galactic archaeology have even greater ambitions: They intend to reconstruct the history of the whole Milky Way. Broadly speaking, the Milky Way galaxy is roughly 13.6 billion years old, with its first stars very large but short lived. Over time, our galaxy became a mix of young and old stars—studying them provides details into how our universe unfolded. This article explores the work of galactic archaeologists and the tools they use to explore the evolution of the galaxy.
From roughly 60 miles above the Earth's surface to farther than light has traveled during the entire age of the universe, space has captured human imagination for millennia. Explore the final frontier with the best resources curated from across the internet.