Tag Archives: gravity

In the future I'm sure there will be a city on the moon. We know how to get there, it's super close, and it could be great for further space exploration. However, there's a problem with living on the moon for any length of time: the weak gravitational field, which …

A team of physicists has discovered that it’s possible to build a real, actual, physical warp drive and not break any known rules of physics. One caveat: The vessel doing the warping can’t exceed the speed of light, so you’re not going to get anywhere interesting anytime soon. But this …

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. When it comes to understanding the fabric of the universe, most of what scientists think exists is consigned to a dark, murky domain. Ordinary matter, the stuff we can see and touch, accounts for just 5 percent of the cosmos. …

Some of my favorite things to look for in the night sky (besides the International Space Station) are the planets. If you need help finding them, I recommend Heavens-Above. It's a website where you can enter your location and it will show you what's currently visible in your area. But …

“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, …

I saw this post on Reddit: Would a cockroach survive a fall from the stratosphere? Oh, what a lovely question. But why stop there? The stratosphere only goes up 50 kilometers—what about a cockroach falling from outer space? Space starts at the Kármán line, which is 100 kilometers up (or …

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Of the 100 trillion neutrinos that pass through you every second, most come from the sun or Earth’s atmosphere. But a smattering of the particles—those moving much faster than the rest—traveled here from powerful sources farther away. For decades, astrophysicists …