Galaxies

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

A planet-forming disk around a million-year-old star has been imaged in unprecedented detail

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).

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.

Unexplained gamma rays streaming from the galactic center may have been produced by dark matter, but more mundane explanations are also possible
 

Is complex life rare in the cosmos? The idea that it could be rests on the observation that the existence of life like us – with large, energy hungry, complicated cells – may be contingent on a number of very specific and unlikely factors in the history of the Earth.

Hubble spots a star in our galaxy’s halo that likely predates its oldest star clusters