Astrophysics

16-year-old Paul Vermeesch recreate the impossible structures in M.C. Escher's Relativity--but with a Star Wars theme--in LEGO.

On April 30, if all goes well, after running out of fuel to fight off orbital decay NASA’s long-running MESSENGER spacecraft will end its mission to Mercury by crashing into the planet’s surface at nearly 4 kilometers per second.

What happens when you make a low-level flyby of a cometary nucleus? You get jaw-dropping images. The above 2-shot mosaic of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko was taken by ESA’s Rosetta orbiter at an effective altitude of just 19.9 kilometers.

Scientists and astronauts recall the telescope’s finest hours as well as threats to its 25-year existence
 

The telescope’s chief scientist started work on the project in 1972, garnering support for the world's first telescope free of Earth's atmosphere's blurring effects

Imagine a trio of aerobatic aircraft. Over the years they've gotten very good at their routine. But they want to add another five or six or seven members.

Astronomers watching galaxies collide found evidence of nongravitational forces that could suggest dark matter interacts with itself
 

The most far-seeing search ever performed for “Dyson spheres” and other artifacts of “astroengineering” comes up empty. Where is everybody?

Fans of sci-fi author Arthur C. Clarke know and love his 1979 classic novel, The Fountains of Paradise. The plot centers on efforts of a visionary structural engineer in the 22nd century, Dr Vannevar Morgan, to construct a space elevator connecting the surface of the earth with a satellite in geostationary orbit, almost a kind [...]

A survey has charted clusters and voids of invisible matter over hundreds of millions of light-years

A recent article by Samuel Arbesman in the science magazine Nautilus discusses the extraordinary sounding possibility that – just perhaps – a search for extraterrestrial intelligence could be made by looking at our DNA.

Along with black holes, neutron stars are the result of stars collapsing under gravity once their fuel burns out, until their density is about the same as that of the nucleus of an atom, at which point the protons and electrons “melt” into pure neutrons.