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Space, physics, time, the universe.
The James Webb Space Telescope spotted giant star-like objects with a black hole actively feeding at their core.
Learn more →Observations of the object AT2024wpp show a star tidally shredded by a black hole that, instead of vanishing, started flaring in a strange, repeating rhythm.
Learn more →Venus spins on its axis so slowly that one day there is longer than one full trip around the Sun.
Learn more →GPS satellites have to correct their clocks by microseconds every day, or the entire navigation system would drift by kilometers.
Learn more →Valles Marineris on Mars is so long that, stretched across the US, it would span an entire continent.
Learn more →After spacewalks, astronaut suits smell like burnt gunpowder and seared meat — and that's not a joke.
Learn more →Neutron star matter is so dense that a single teaspoon of it on Earth would weigh billions of tons.
Learn more →A light-year sounds like a unit of time, but it's actually the distance light travels in a year — almost 9.5 trillion kilometers.
Learn more →The Sun holds over 99.8% of all the mass in the Solar System — every planet combined barely registers.
Learn more →The galaxies themselves aren't moving faster than light, but the space between us and them is stretching fast enough that the effective distance grows faster than c.
Learn more →The crushing pressure inside these gas giants' atmospheres may turn carbon into crystalline diamonds that sink toward the core.
Learn more →Without gravity compressing the spine, astronauts come back from missions temporarily taller than when they left.
Learn more →Tidal friction caused by the Moon is slowly braking Earth's rotation, so the day has been gradually stretching for billions of years.
Learn more →The name suggests emptiness, but a black hole is the opposite of empty: an enormous mass packed into an unprecedentedly tiny volume.
Learn more →Up and down are just a local side effect of Earth's gravity — out in open space, those words simply don't apply.
Learn more →Light from distant stars and galaxies takes years, millennia, or billions of years to reach us, so we see them as they were long ago.
Learn more →The Moon drifts a few centimeters farther from Earth every year, which will eventually change how solar eclipses look.
Learn more →Sound needs a medium like air to travel — in the vacuum of space, even a supernova blast is completely silent.
Learn more →If a big enough tub existed, Saturn's density is low enough that the planet would actually float.
Learn more →Ordinary matter made of atoms is just a sliver of the universe's contents — the rest is dark matter and dark energy.
Learn more →Pluto orbits the Sun once every 248 Earth years, and it was discovered in 1930 — it hasn't completed a single full lap yet.
Learn more →Beyond Earth's atmosphere, high-energy cosmic particles pass straight through the retina, triggering visible flashes even in total darkness.
Learn more →