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When it comes to Valentine's day, flowers are kind of boring. Do they smell nice? Yes. But they also reek of unoriginality. Face it, people, the bouquet of roses has been done. More »
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Remember when the Church got all up in Galileo's grill for challenging the geocentric interpretation of the Universe? Seeing this almost makes you wonder if the Universe is still a little sore about that. More »
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Damn. This, ladies and gentlemen, is what stargazers call a globular cluster — a spherical grouping of gravitationally bound celestial bodies, swirling about deep in the inky blackness of space. [Hi-res available here] More »
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Think of all the work that goes into getting a birds-eye view of our home planet. Now imagine how hard it would be to snap a photo that manages to capture our entire galaxy. More »
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We spend a lot of time thinking about futurism, but the past is pretty interesting, too. In this week's "Ask a Physicist" we get extra speculative and think about what things may have been like before the beginning of time. What was there before the Big Bang? Did anything exist before our current universe? Here's what we know. More »
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Every so often, incredibly energetic charged particles will reach Earth - and we're not sure what could possibly be powerful enough to generate these cosmic rays. Now we might have the answer...and it's just an absurdly specific set of circumstances. More »
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Have you met Ebb and Flow? The twin spacecraft entered lunar orbit last month with aims of uncovering the mystery of the Moon's formation. More »
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Chalk another one up to NASA's Kepler Mission. The Agency's team of planet-hunters announced yesterday the discovery of 11 new planetary systems, which together harbor 26 brand spanking new planets. More »
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Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich has promised us a permanent Moon base by 2020. Many people have been calling Newt's vow a publicity stunt, while others have chimed in by attacking the idea of a lunar base in and of itself, with assertions like "real scientists know [a Moon base] is fantasy." More »
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Who would ever imagine that sand dunes could look so incredible? In this beautiful image, sand trapped in an impact crater in the Red Planet's Moachis Terra region have been sculpted by the winds of Mars into a vast and variegated landscape. More »
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NASA has just released this mind-blowing photograph Earth, which was captured earlier this month by the Agency's most recently launched Earth-observing satellite, Suomi NPP. More »
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Last week, a swelling solar storm on the surface of the Sun sent a stream of charged particles hurtling toward Earth, making for beautiful northern lights in the planet's extreme latitudes. But late last night, at 10:59 p.m. EST, the now massive tempest unleashed an eruption that scientists expect will be responsible for Earth's largest solar radiation storm since 2005. More »
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Feast your eyes on one of the most puzzling planetary mysteries our solar system has to offer. In this photograph of Saturn's north pole, captured by NASA's Cassini spacecraft in 2009, clouds can be seen encircling the planet at about 77 degrees north latitude. Even at such a high parallel, the massive six-sided jet stream has a diameter more than twice that of Earth's. More »
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For the first time ever, scientists have witnessed and recorded a comet disintegrating in the Sun's atmosphere. The icy body — dubbed "comet C/2011 N3 (SOHO)" — was originally observed back in July. Today, the team that observed the comet flaming out of existence has published an in-depth analysis of what really happened. More »
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We now estimate that every star in the galaxy has at least one planet, but that is leaving aside the potentially billions more planets that were ejected from their solar system and are now hurtling through the universe all alone. More »
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Tomorrow, astronomers and physicists from around the word will convene in Tucson, Arizona to discuss the Event Horizon Telescope Project — a global network of 50 radio telescopes that together could soon enable us to photograph the black hole at the center of our galaxy. More »
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Bad puns aside, this is actually pretty cool. NASA has set up two webcams in the cleanroom of Goddard Space Flight Center, where engineers are busy assembling the James Webb Space Telescope — the deep space imaging apparatus that will allow us to see farther into space than ever before. More »
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Although dark matter's exact nature is still unknown, what we do know is that the amount of gravity in the universe is greater than the amount of visible matter that it corresponds to. This anomaly could be explained by some unseen source of extra mass, which provides the additional gravity that helps hold galaxies together. And the missing matter behind this extra mass has been dubbed dark matter. More »
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Featured in the latest issue of Playboy is a totally engrossing profile — written by The Loom's Carl Zimmer — on astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium and one of the most highly regarded science communicators of our time. More »
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NASA's on a mission to uncover the secrets of the Moon's formation, and they'll have to journey to its core to do it. But there wont be any drilling on this expedition. Instead, the agency will employ two identical, orbiting spacecraft — dubbed GRAIL-A and GRAIL-B — to take precise measurements of the Moon's gravitational field, providing NASA scientists with data that will reveal the craggy body's internal structure in unprecedented detail. More »
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Have you got a knack for electronics and computers, a penchant for public speaking, and a strong desire to work for one of the most brilliant scientists of our time? If so, have we got some news for you. More »
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From law-violating subatomic particles to entirely new, earth-like worlds, 2011 was an incredible year for scientific discovery. In the past 12 months, scientific breakthroughs in fields ranging from archaeology to structural biochemistry have allowed humanity to rewrite history, and enabled us to open to brand new chapters in our development as a species. More »
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NASA's Kepler telescope has now identified an insane 2,326 possible exoplanets. What's particularly shocking is how many of these planets are giant rocky planets known as Super-Earths, which defies everything we thought we knew about planet formation. More »
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When NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida in 1977, its primary mission was to explore Jupiter and Saturn, the largest planets in our solar system. On November 16, 1980, the spacecraft captured this photograph of Saturn from a distance of just 5.3-million kilometers. More »
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Geomagnetic storms are probably most famous for generating especially vibrant aurorae — some of the most breathtaking natural light displays on Earth. But these storms also give rise to all manner of electromagnetic interference across the radio spectrum — interference that gets picked up and measured by equipment here on Earth, like Canada's CARISMA radio array. More »
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Yesterday, NASA announced a milestone in the almost 22-year history of its Hubble Space Telescope: The 10,000th refereed scientific paper based on Hubble data has now been published, reinforcing that Hubble is one of the most successful astronomical experiments in human history. More »
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What's 10-billion times as massive as our Sun, several times larger than our solar system, and has a gravitational influence on pretty much anything that comes within 2000 light years of its gaping, cosmic maw? Why, that would be a recently discovered black hole at the center of elliptical galaxy NGC 3842, the smaller — yes, smaller — of two supermassive black holes that astronomers have announced are the most massive they've ever discovered. More »
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It may have a radius about 2.4 times that of our home planet, but NASA scientists have confirmed that Kepler-22b — depicted in the artist's conception up top — is the first planet we've ever confirmed orbits within the so-called "habitable zone" of a Sun-like star, making it the most Earth-like planet we've yet discovered. More »
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This is excellent. Back in 2010, an out-of-character Stephen Colbert sat down with astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson at Montclair Kimberly Academy to talk for 90 minutes about science, society and the universe. Yesterday, the Hayden Planetarium posted the interview on its website for all to watch. More »
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For decades, humanity has been launching missions to Mars, in hopes of making sense of the enigma that is our solar system's most Earth-like planet. And as with all good mysteries, many of our investigations have simply led to more questions. More »
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Put in plain language, astrophysicists have figured out why Jupiter's moon Europa looks so fucked up. The frozen moon's surface is a layer of solid ice over a liquid sea — and that ice is shattered, cracked, broken, sunken, and twisted into contortions that science can't fully explain. But now a new study suggests one simple source of the Europan landscape that's so distorted it's called "chaos terrain." More »
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Billions of years ago, when the universe was still in its infancy, the formation of stars is believed to have occurred at a much faster rate than it does today. Now, a recent discovery by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope (HST) suggests that the universe's earliest galaxies may have been pumping out stars even faster than we thought. More »
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Chances are you've seen your fair share of interesting looking stars here on io9, but you've never seen one quite like this. According to NASA, it's the first star we've ever seen with spiral-arm-like structures. More »
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Some star clusters have no business surviving. For instance, there's a tiny cluster right next to our galaxy's supermassive black hole, which should be ripped apart by its intense gravity. But there's more to this cluster than meets the eye. More »
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I'll come right out and say it: you need to watch this video. It's quite a bit longer than a lot of what we feature here on io9, but the weekend is almost here, and you owe it to yourself to set aside 53 minutes to watch a veritable scientific dream team talk about humanity's future in space. More »
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Dark matter almost certainly exists - otherwise, galaxy clusters wouldn't have sufficient gravity to hold themselves together. It was hoped dwarf galaxies could confirm the leading dark matter theories. But a new study has drawn a big, frustrating blank. More »
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Call it moonception, if you'd like. Astronomers say that a moon-with-a-moon scenario could explain some of the strange features of Iapetus, the third-largest of Saturn's 62-known moons. More »
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A basic fact of the universe is that space is a dark, black expanse that's only broken up by the lights of stars and galaxies. But that wasn't always the case — space was once a dense, opaque fog. More »
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Back in August, we told you about a free course on artificial intelligence being offered by Stanford University, and co-taught by two world-renowned AI experts. The class officially started today, so if you managed to register for it on time, then good on you. More »
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Pulsars are the lighthouses of the universe; from here on Earth, the waves of electromagnetic radiation emitted by these incredibly dense neutron stars as they whirl rapidly about their axes resemble rhythmic pulses of light. More »
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