Astrophysics

The American Physical Society is holding its annual April Meeting at the moment in Baltimore, Maryland, and one of the highlights, research-wise, comes to us courtesy of the Dark Energy Survey (DES) collaboration.

One of the coolest—and most stressful–moments of my career took place November 7, 1996, when I was a staff writer for Scientific American.

Green as a color can mean animal, vegetable or mineral. It is the stuff of crocodiles, chlorophyll and copper patina, the essence of serpentine or of snakes in the grass, the hue of a glacial lake, a stagnant pond and the Chicago River on St.

Careening toward the sun, Jupiter cleared the way for Earth to form—with help from Saturn, too

The darkest part of Earth's shadow will fall across the lunar surface, producing a "blood moon"

One of the architects of the idea that “firewalls” of high-energy particles border black holes will answer readers’ questions in a video chat

We live a mere 93 million miles from an enormous fusion reactor. It’s easy to overlook this, after all the Sun is only about halfway through its long slog of converting protons into helium nuclei deep inside its core.

              In an idle moment, while staring at a set of solar system data, it occurred to me that it might be interesting to display a set of planetary surfaces on an equal footing, where the overall texture of these worlds was visible (although topography is probably a more [...]

The program will not repeat past mistakes, officials vow, and will launch as planned in 2018
 

It's been a long time coming, but this week NASA's Mars Opportunity rover completed the first-ever Martian marathon. After landing on the Red Planet in January 2004 on a mission originally planned to only last 90 days, Opportunity has instead endured for more than a decade, and has taken eleven years and two months to [...]

A new out-of-this-world theory links mass extinctions with exotic astrophysics and galactic architecture

Black holes break theories. These sites of extremely large masses in extremely small spaces invoke both of the behemoths of modern physics—general relativity (which rules over large masses) and quantum mechanics (which reigns in small spaces).