For an empirical science, physics can be remarkably dismissive of some of our most basic observations. We see objects existing in definite locations, but the wave nature of matter…

David McComas has a favorite “astrosphere,” the environment created by a star’s stellar wind as it buffets the surrounding interstellar medium. It belongs to a star named Mira.…

Terri Randall’s hope when she makes films about space exploration—like Chasing Pluto, for example, or Death Dive to Saturn—is that viewers share scientists’ excitement. That…

Do you ever feel like someone is watching you? They could be. And I’m not talking about the odd neighbors at the end of your street.This summer, at the Carl Sagan Institute at Cornell…

Let me tell you what it’s like to be an astrobiologist.I painted a white picket fence this summer. No one asked me to. It was a task I’d set myself without realizing what a long-winded…

I walked out of the airlock onto the blood-red Martian surface. My mind was crystal clear and laser focused. There was no room for panic or anxiety as I surveyed the landscape and…

Our human world is soaked in light. For starters there are the 100,000 trillion photons arriving every second at every square centimeter of Earth’s dayside surface, after racing…

As I write this at the end of July, 79 wildfires are burning across 12 states in the U.S. In Oregon, a mammoth fire has engulfed some 400,000 acres—an area half the size of Rhode…

On the dark night of March 13, 1781, William Herschel settled down in his garden observatory in Bath, England, for a routine night of observing stars, when he noticed something out…

Quantum mechanics seems to have a problem with the order of time, which might signal the need for an entirely new type of law.Illustration by Ekaterina Kulaeva / ShutterstockThe history…