Looking up into the bright Mojave sky in 2004, I strained to keep my eyes on the tiny spaceship 50,000 feet up. "Three, two, one... release, release, release!" came the call over the loudspeakers...
Excitement is building — at least in science circles — for the upcoming announcements of the 2014 Nobel Prizes, along with the inevitable speculation about who might be among this year’s winners...
Astrophysicist Joshua Frieman seeks to pinpoint the mysterious substance driving the accelerating expansion of the universe
If biologically important organic molecules like amino acids could form in interstellar space, the implications would be enormous. On the Earth we find plenty of amino acid species inside certain types of meteorites, so at a minimum these compounds can form during the assembly of a proto-stellar, proto-planetary system (at least this one) and end [...]..
Not all water in the solar system today could have formed in our solar system
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...
The Mangalyaan probe, the country's first mission to another world, has entered the Red Planet's orbit
Some say its glory days are long gone, but the universe has life in it yet. Brand-new types of celestial phenomena will unfold over the coming billions and trillions of years
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
Space rocks tend to stick with their own kind
Dark energy does more than hurry along the expansion of the universe. It also has a stranglehold on the shape and spacing of galaxies
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
