Space is a cold and barren place. Nothing can exist there, nothing!” Ludwig Von Drake, an obscure uncle of Donald Duck and a professor of astronomy, is sitting on a high stool in…

Forty years ago this coming Tuesday, a car-sized piece of equipment launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida. Thirty five years later, it became the first and only man-made object to…

Mars is currently inhabited by an estimated 1 million microbes. They coat the surfaces and crowd the innards of our robotic landers and rovers, which international policy requires…

Back in the day, before the speed of light was considered the slow lane, “extreme” sports—bungee jumping from bridges, hang gliding over volcanoes—were barely deadly and almost…

Let’s be optimistic and assume that we manage to avoid a self-inflicted nuclear holocaust, an extinction-sized asteroid, or deadly irradiation from a nearby supernova. That leaves…

No known object in existence has as clear a division between “inside” and “outside” as a black hole. We live and see the outside, and no probe will bring us information about…

The celestial object came flying across the nighttime sky quickly, moving in an unusual pattern. Chiara Mingarelli and her friend saw it from a field in rural Ontario, their regular…

It begins like a classic romance: Two black holes meet. The attraction is practically instant. They dance around each other, swirling closer and closer, until ... Until what? As with…

Like countless so-crazy-it-just-might-work schemes, this one began with a gripe session. In the fall of 2011, Roberto Abraham and Pieter van Dokkum were commiserating at a Nepalese…

With 2015 now behind us, what truly stands out? Other than (alas) holding the record for hottest year in recorded history? Amid a confusion of good, bad, and disturbing news, what…