Why Is It So Tricky to Show the Sun, Earth, and Moon in a Diagram?
Earth, sun, moon: three objects in space whose interactions have a pretty big impact on our lives. Earth orbits the sun once a year, and it rotates on its axis …
gravity
NASA Considers Using Floating Clocks In Space To Tell Time On The Moon
Illustration: Blue Origin The White House announced earlier this year it would implement a unified time standard for the Moon by 2027, an essential measure as NASA aims to establish …
How to Run on the Moon
When the elevator is stopped, the two forces are equal and opposite, and the net force is zero. But if you’re accelerating upward, the net force must also be upward. …
A Warp Drive Breakthrough Inches a Tiny Bit Closer to ‘Star Trek’
A team of physicists has discovered that it’s possible to build a real, actual, physical warp drive and not break any known rules of physics. One caveat: The vessel doing …
Thereâs a New Theory About Where Dark Matter Is Hiding
But there may be opportunities to indirectly spot the signatures of those gravitons. One strategy Vafa and his collaborators are pursuing draws on large-scale cosmological surveys that chart the distribution …
Why Is Our Solar System Flat?
But the solar system contains more than two masses. In fact, it started as a big cloud of dust without any planets and without the sun, and every speck of …
Dr. Nergis Mavalvala Detected the First Gravitational Wave. Her Work Doesn’t Stop There
“Where did all this come from? How did it all get started?” These are the questions that Dr. Nergis Mavalvala asks about the universe. It’s not the meaning-of-life stuff in …
Could a Cockroach Survive a Fall From Space?
There’s some cool stuff going on here. Notice that for the objects with air resistance, they all reach incredibly high velocities as they fall in the upper atmosphere where they …
A New Map of the Universe, Painted With Cosmic Neutrinos
-copy.jpg "A New Map of the Universe, Painted With Cosmic Neutrinos")
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Of the 100 trillion neutrinos that pass through you every second, most come from the sun or Earth’s atmosphere. But …