Paul Sutter

Space mysteries If you're in the mood to destroy an entire galaxy, you have several options, depending on your desired level of destructiveness.

Special relativity is beyond weird. Among its many statements are that moving clocks run slow and that moving rulers shrink. But how are we supposed to make sense of this?

Leftover light from the young universe has a major flaw, and we don't know how to fix it. It's the cold spot. It's just way too big and way too cold.

New research shows how disruptions to binary star systems could be the key to detecting space's most confounding substance — dark matter.

Space mysteries Astronomers are especially interested in the habitability of these kinds of planets, which always face their star with the same side, because they are incredibly common in the universe.

Space mysteries The Apollo program put humans on the moon in 1969. So why haven't we sent any more since?

Space mysteries To the unaided human eye, the night sky is resplendent with over 9,000 individual points of light, but that perspective covers only a bare fraction of the universe.

The idea is still new and requires a lot of assumptions in its calculations to make it work. Over the years, experimental results have been mixed.

Space mysteries Imagine a future where the universe, all too soon, tears itself apart. Eventually, space-time is torn asunder, rendering the universe uninhabitable.

Any day now, it could happen: We could detect an asteroid on an Earth-crossing trajectory. It might be tomorrow; it might be a thousand years from now. So what can we do about it?

Directly mapping the Milky Way is an extremely challenging task, but observations of other galaxies helped us piece together what our home galaxy looked like.

Astronomers still aren't exactly sure how planets get their start.

One astronomer proposes that, instead of building gigantic, expensive experiments on Earth, we should try another method of searching for dark matter: Looking to the stars.

Scientists modeled how black holes and neutron stars form after dying stars collapse, and explained why some get a hard 'kick' into interstellar space.

11 of the biggest stories about the smallest particles from 2023.

Some physicists have hypothesized that in the earliest moments of the Big Bang, the forces of nature were so extreme and so exotic that they could have supported the growth of complex structures.

In an age of diminishing trust in science, scientists need to change how they work with the public and within the broader scientific community.

An astronomer has outlined a way for methane-producing life to thrive in the molecular clouds of deep space, opening up a new pathway to understanding the potential origins and diversity of life.

Due to the mind-blowing distances and speeds required, interstellar travel remains a major spaceflight challenge. But new research highlights yet another hurdle: Communication blackouts.

Space mysteries Even though the density of interstellar space is billions of times lower than even our emptiest human-made vacuum chambers, it's not 100% percent empty.

Humanity's ability to track and monitor celestial cycles stretches back into prehistory, long before the invention of telescopes and astrolabes.

Astronomers developed a sophisticated computer simulation to explore whether or not strange star Betelgeuse may be the result of a merger between two smaller stars.

Space is a dangerous place, especially when it comes to high-energy particles, and intense solar activity can pose threats to people and technology on Earth.

The hellish super-Earth '55 Cancri e' may be constantly losing and re-growing its atmosphere, a new study of the planet's strange transit signals suggests.