Astrophysics

As the European Space Agency’s Philae lander bounced and settled onto the surface of comet 67P/C-G’s crumbly nucleus it wasn’t just space exploration, it was time travel.

Christopher Nolan’s new film, Interstellar, is a near-future tale of astronauts departing a dying Earth to travel to Saturn, then through a wormhole to another galaxy, all in search of somewhere else humanity could call home.

If dark matter comes in both matter and antimatter varieties, it might accumulate inside dense stars to create black holes
 

It was a big week for physics in the movies, with the premiere of Interstellar, and the Stephen Hawking biopic The Theory of Everything. That translates into lots of pixels commenting on the science behind the films.

A rocket experiment has captured the glow attributed to renegade stars in intergalactic space

Theoretical physicist Nima Arkani-Hamed will present a free live Webcast on the latest insights into the nature of spacetime from the quantum world
 

On November 12th 2014 the European Space Agency’s Rosetta mission will eject the small robotic lander Philae on a trajectory that should take it down to the surface of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko (or 67P/C-P for short).

These particles should not have mass, but they do. By sending neutrinos through the ground from Illinois to Minnesota, physicists hope to learn why
 

The cause of the deadly crash of Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo on Friday remains unknown, but the commercial spaceplane's feathered reentry system looks to have been involved.

Hope everyone enjoyed their Halloween festivities. Here’s a few other related links: The ghostly glow of St. Elmo’s fire: it works the same way that a neon light glows.  The Levitating Halloween Pumpkin with a superconductor inside.  Bonus: More Conceptual Physics Halloween Costumes.This year, go out as The Holographic Principle!

I met Stephen Hawking in the summer of 1990, when I spent five days in northern Sweden at a conference attended by 30 or so leading cosmologists.

Do not try this at home. A Russian Proton-M launch goes wrong – and it can happen to anyone (wait for the shock wave). A rocket is a controlled bomb.