4+ day, 21+ hour ago   (559+ words) In empty space, light travels at exactly 299,792,458 meters per second. That is about 300,000 kilometers per second, or 186,282 miles per second. It is the fastest speed at which matter, energy, or information can travel through the universe. The number is so…...

1+ week, 3+ day ago   (387+ words) Astronomers have catalogued more than 120 molecular species in a cloud near the centre of the Milky Way. The finding matters because the cloud contains several compounds associated with the chemical building blocks of life, and it closely resembles another unusually…...

1+ week, 3+ day ago   (268+ words) Einstein’s theory of general relativity has survived another demanding test. Researchers used clouds of ultracold atoms aboard China’s space station to compare how two forms of rubidium respond to gravity, and found no measurable difference between them. Before your next…...

1+ week, 4+ day ago   (453+ words) Astronomers often treat the thin streams of stars around the Milky Way as sensitive tracers of dark matter. A new University of Washington simulation shows why that evidence needs to be read carefully: the visible structure of a galaxy can…...

2+ week, 1+ day ago   (605+ words) The work, led by Yansheng Zhang and colleagues at the University of Cambridge, uses a two-dimensional Bose–Einstein condensate made from potassium-39 atoms. At temperatures just above absolute zero, the atoms behave collectively, allowing the researchers to track changes across…...

3+ week, 16+ hour ago   (802+ words) A new study proposes using gamma-ray sources to search for the universe’s fossil neutrinos, a relic signal left from the first seconds after the Big Bang. The Universe should be filled with a faint bath of ancient neutrinos left over…...

3+ week, 1+ day ago   (757+ words) Avi Loeb has proposed a Galileo Observatory at Carl Sagan’s former Ithaca home, linking public astronomy with a transparent search for UAP evidence. Carl Sagan’s former home could one day host a small observatory dedicated to watching the sky. Avi…...

3+ week, 6+ day ago   (771+ words) The Milky Way is not the center of the universe. No observation has placed Earth or our galaxy in a privileged position, and the large-scale universe looks broadly the same in every direction. Avi Loeb recently explored a stranger possibility:…...

4+ week, 1+ day ago   (758+ words) Look up on a clear night and the sky between the stars is mostly black. That seems obvious until you ask a deceptively simple question: if the universe contains an enormous number of stars, why is every direction not filled…...