Tag Archives: astrophysics

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. To understand the universe, scientists look to its outliers. “You always want to know about the extreme cases—the special cases that lie at the edge,” said Carsten Gundlach, a mathematical physicist at the University of Southampton. Black holes are the …

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. The end is brutal for electrons hurtling at 99.9999999 percent of the speed of light through SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory’s two-mile-long beam pipe: a final slam into End Station A. In the late 1960s and early ’70s, such collisions broke …

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Our sun is the best-observed star in the entire universe. We see its light every day. For centuries, scientists have tracked the dark spots dappling its radiant face, while in recent decades, telescopes in space and on Earth have scrutinized …

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Physicists have deduced subtle hints that the mysterious “dark” energy that drives the universe to expand faster and faster may be slightly weakening with time. It’s a finding that has the potential to shake the foundations of physics. “If true, …

“Where did all this come from? How did it all get started?” These are the questions that Dr. Nergis Mavalvala asks about the universe. It’s not the meaning-of-life stuff in the traditional sense, but more of how everything around us came to be. These are the questions we all have, …

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Our planet is doomed. In a few billion years, the sun will exhaust its hydrogen fuel and swell into a red giant—a star so big it will scorch, blacken and swallow up the inner planets. While red giants are bad …

Scientists leading the European Space Agency’s Euclid space telescope mission have just released its breathtaking first science images, taken only four months after launch. These new space photos reveal spectacular snapshots of the vast structure of the cosmos, including a massive galaxy cluster in the Perseus constellation, an object nicknamed …

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Years before she was even sure the James Webb Space Telescope would successfully launch, Christina Eilers started planning a conference for astronomers specializing in the early universe. She knew that if—preferably, when—JWST started making observations, she and her colleagues would …

The blazing surface of the sun froths with an extremely hot electrically charged gas called plasma. The temperature at the edge of this cosmic furnace runs at about 5,500 degrees Celsius, but here’s the real puzzle: Somehow the sun’s atmosphere, which surrounds that surface like a halo, is 150 times …