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 ...
In 1960, Freeman Dyson proposed how advanced civilizations could create megastructures that enclosed their system, allowing them to harness all of their star's energy and multiplying the habitable space they could occupy. ...
Einstein's theory of gravity—general relativity—has been very successful for more than a century. However, it has theoretical shortcomings. This is not surprising: the theory predicts its own failure at spacetime singularities ...
A new study reports conclusive evidence for the breakdown of standard gravity in the low acceleration limit from a verifiable analysis of the orbital motions of long-period, widely separated, binary stars, usually referred ...
Nearly all life, from bacteria to humans, uses the same genetic code. This code acts as a dictionary, translating genes into the amino acids used to build proteins. The universality of the genetic code indicates a common ...
Water is essential for life, but for astrophysicists, it represents something more. Researchers look at water in galaxies, its distribution and in particular its changes of state from ice to vapor, as important markers indicating ...
Our ideas about the universe are based on a century-old simplification known as the cosmological principle. It suggests that when averaged on large scales, the Cosmos is homogeneous and matter is distributed evenly throughout.
Isaac Newton formulated his theory of gravity as an action at a distance: a planet instantly feels the influence of another celestial body, no matter the distance between them. This characteristic motivated Albert Einstein ...
The late physicist Stephen Hawking first asked me to work with him to develop "a new quantum theory of the Big Bang" in 1998. What started out as a doctoral project evolved over some 20 years into an intense collaboration ...
