Expert Voices - Paul Sutter: Explaining astrophysics and astronomy

How common are ice-covered planets like Hoth from "Star Wars," and might they be capable of hosting life? As usual, the answer is, it depends.

The Pacific Ocean Neutrino Experiment would turn a massive swath of the Pacific Ocean into nature's own neutrino detector.

Hiding beneath the outer layers of some planets, there may be something spectacular: a constant rain of diamonds.

The recently launched James Webb Telescope should help determine if dark matter is made up of primordial black holes.

The world could end not with a bang, but with a quantum vacuum decay of the ground state of the universe to its true minimum.

How do you test theories of the universe? By building gigantic supercomputers and simulating the evolution of the cosmos.

Wormholes may be stable after all, a new theory suggests, contradicting previous predictions that these hypothetical shortcuts through space-time would instantly collapse.

In a recent study, researchers determined that about 1% of all the "normal" (that is, not dark) matter in the universe is bound up inside black holes.

Since 2014, there have been over 300 proposals for solutions to the "crisis in cosmology." None of these proposals is universally agreed upon by cosmologists, and the crisis just keeps getting worse.

The elements around some giant black holes may be subtly different from the cosmic average, retaining a relic memory of the young universe.