Astrophysics

Scientists must now decide whether the anomalous signal is truly exotic or has a more mundane provenance

I’ve always been an Edgar Allan Poe fan, so much so that I even watched the horrifying—not in a good way–2012 film The Raven.

President Obama made a rare shout-out to space in Tuesday's State of the Union Address, referencing NASA's recent Orion capsule launch and addressing astronaut Scott Kelly in the audience at the Capitol.

I remember battling sleepiness as I slouched in a large lecture hall, squinting to make out the writing on the blackboard during my freshman introductory physics course in college.

NASA’s Dawn mission, having performed remarkably at the asteroid Vesta, is homing in on Ceres. The spacecraft’s ion engines will bring it to a capture orbit around this 590 mile diameter dwarf planet on March 6th, 2015 – at a distance some 2.5 times further from the Sun than the Earth.

NASA's planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft finds two worlds that have sizes and orbits similar to ours
 

Books and recommendations from Scientific American

The agency’s proposed human trip to a space rock has a bumpy road ahead

New image shows the star’s system shares features with our own

From humanity’s first, flawed foray to the surface of a comet to the celebrated discovery of (and less celebrated skepticism about) primordial gravitational waves, 2014 has brought some historic successes and failures in space science and physics.

The Christmas holiday approacheth, and for those of a Maker bent, here’s how to Build A Sled For Slinging Snowballs — Winter Warfare Will Never Be the Same.  If you’re more the craft-y sort, now you can deck the halls with Nobel physicists with this physics twist on the craft of cutting paper snowflakes.

We almost certainly have nothing to fear from one of the largest and brightest stars in the sky