Astrophysics

This week on Virtually Speaking Science, I chatted with astrophysicist Katie Freese, author of a new book, The Cosmic Cocktail: Three Parts Dark Matter.

Before they can see Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the center of the Milky Way, the astronomers of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) must complete an epic to-do list.

A star 890,000 light-years away patrols our galactic frontier

After a ten year journey, NASA’s New Horizons mission is still 420 million kilometers from the Pluto system – but that’s close enough to begin to see the orbital dance of an icy world and its major moon.

A new estimate finds that the Milky Way, once thought to be twice as massive as Andromeda, may actually only have half our neighbor galaxy's mass. Christopher Intagliata reports 

 

In a month’s time, the end result of two-and-a-half years of research, thinking, writing, re-writing, re-re-writing, editing, mulling, puzzling, coffee-drinking, beer-swilling, swearing, and tweaking will hit the shelves in the form of my new book The Copernicus Complex.

Is energy always conserved, even in the case of the expanding universe?
 

Looking for a few good popular math books? In the latest New York Times Book Review, I look at five terrific recent ones: Jordan Ellenberg's How Not to Be Wrong, David J.

All stars are born in groups but then slowly disperse into space. A new theory seeks to explain how these groups form and fall apart or, in rare cases, persist for hundreds of millions of years

Total energy must be conserved. Every student of physics learns this fundamental law. The trouble is, it does not apply to the universe as a whole

Deep down, the particles and forces of the universe are a manifestation of exquisite geometry

Our universe may have started not with a big bang but with a big bounce—an implosion that triggered an explosion, all driven by exotic quantum-gravitational effects