Cosmology

The skies of Mars just got a little more crowded. On September 21st, 2014 NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission (MAVEN) fired its engines for some 33 minutes in order to swing into a safe orbit.

Data from the International Space Station-based Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer experiment supports the idea that dark matter consists of the invisible particles called weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs. Clara Moskowitz reports
 

The Mangalyaan probe, the country's first mission to another world, has entered the Red Planet's orbit

Failure to discover primordial spacetime ripples could open the way for a physicist’s alternative theory  

A couple of years ago, one of my thesis mentors sought visually impaired scientists working at a major space science agency in the United States.

At a 1990 conference on cosmology, I asked attendees, who included folks like Stephen Hawking, Michael Turner, James Peebles, Alan Guth and Andrei Linde, to nominate the smartest living physicist.

The latest data from the Planck satellite suggest the highly touted finding of spacetime ripples may have been mistaken
 

Books and recommendations from Scientific American

New measurement points to possible error in ESA survey that could also affect the agency's new Gaia mission

We’re used to thinking of the space between the stars as void, bereft of all but the most sparsely distributed atoms and molecules, or the occasional microscopic grain of silicon or carbon dust.

This post is one in a series covering, and expanding on, topics in the book The Copernicus Complex (Scientific American/FSG).           The conversation usually goes like this: Do you think we’re alone in the universe?

The detection of the chemical signature of a relic star brings long-awaited evidence for massive stellar ancestors