A critical NASA mission in the search for life beyond Earth, Mars Sample Return, is in trouble. Its budget has ballooned from US$5 billion to over $11 billion, and the sample return date may slip from the end of this decade ...
What is the mass of a neutrino at rest? This is one of the big unanswered questions in physics. Neutrinos play a central role in nature. A team led by Klaus Blaum, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics ...
Planets orbit their parent stars while separated by enormous distances—in our solar system, planets are like grains of sand in a region the size of a football field. The time that planets take to orbit their suns have no ...
The discovery of a second ultra-large structure in the remote universe has further challenged some of the basic assumptions about cosmology.
In 1950, while sitting down to lunch with colleagues at the Los Alamos Laboratory, famed physicist and nuclear scientist Enrico Fermi asked his famous question: "Where is everybody?" In short, Fermi was addressing the all-important ...
The scientific worldview has made great contributions to humanity's flourishing. But, as science advances into territory once firmly held by religion—attempting to answer questions about the origins of the universe, life ...
The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has always been plagued by uncertainty. With only one habitable planet (Earth) and one technologically advanced civilization (humanity) as examples, scientists are still ...
A University of Portsmouth physicist has explored whether a new law of physics could support the much-debated theory that we are simply characters in an advanced virtual world.
In recent years, astronomy has seen itself in a bit of crisis: Although we know that the universe expands, and although we know approximately how fast, the two primary ways to measure this expansion do not agree. Now astrophysicists ...
In 1960, while preparing for the first meeting on the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), legendary astronomer and SETI pioneer Dr. Frank Drake unveiled his probabilistic equation for estimating the number of ...
