Field: Physics

Terraforming Mars has been a dream for decades; here’s how we might get it started today.

Patience and persistence pays off in ways researchers never expected, allowing them to hear the dying whispers of a distant star.

There are many techniques to search for planets orbiting other stars. Perhaps the simplest of these is called direct imaging, but it's not easy.

The Nancy Roman Telescope is already being built with a goal no smaller than to find inhabited planets beyond Earth.

Here in our Solar System, of all the known planets, only Earth — not Mercury, not Venus, and not Mars — possesses plate tectonics.

Normally seen with identical particles, entanglement has just been demonstrated between particles with opposite charges.

Two years after proposing his general theory of relativity, Einstein endeavored to find the shape of the Universe.

Even if you took an empty container devoid of all matter and cooled it to absolute zero, there is still "something" in the container.

When asked about physics, ChatGPT gave a mixture of true, false, relevant, irrelevant, and contradictory answers — all with authority.

Is quantum mechanics weird? Yes. Is it wrong? No. At least not in any way Albert Einstein could prove.

Researchers possibly witnessed entanglement in the brain, indicating that some brain activity, like consciousness, operates on a quantum level.

Muons only live for 2.2 microseconds before decaying. Thanks to Einstein's relativity, they make it to the surface of the earth. Here's how to prove it.

Though it makes up about 26% of the Universe, we cannot see dark matter. But we know it's there because we can see its effects.

Can an astrophysicist get ChatGPT to learn and assimilate new information and give correct answers where it gave confident but false ones?

After decades of wondering how ring galaxies form, we've caught them in enough stages of evolution that we finally know where they come from.

In the 1920s, the wave-particle duality of light was extended to include all material objects, from electrons to you.

On Nov. 29, 2022, the Shenzhou 15 mission launched from China’s Gobi Desert carrying three taikonauts – the Chinese word for astronauts.

Scientists have pushed the Milky Way's early history back more than 2 billion years: to less than 800 million years after the Big Bang.

Researchers in California achieved net energy gain in a thermonuclear fusion experiment. But how great of a breakthrough is this, really?

SpinLaunch has a working prototype successfully launching objects at 1,000 miles-per-hour, but will the laws of physics stand in the way?

This year, NIF reports that it has achieved "ignition" — that is, it has achieved slightly more fusion energy output than laser energy input.

The length of our day changes slightly over a six-year period. This recent discovery has perplexed scientists for about a decade.

The "upper limit" to the size of our planets is exceeded in other stellar systems, but double Jupiter's radius seems to be the limit.

The idea of atoms goes as far back as the ancient Greek philosopher Democritus in 400 B.C.E., who thought physics left no room for free will.

Scientists carried out an ultra-precise test of a core premise of Einstein’s modern theory of gravity. The theory stood up.

Interstellar distances are vast, and extremely advanced technology will be required if we (or aliens) want to visit other star systems.

Three pioneers — John Clauser, Alain Aspect, and Anton Zeilinger — helped make quantum information systems a bona fide science.

An undergraduate and his supervisor ran the numbers and found paradox-free time travel to be mathematically consistent.

Scientists trained a neural network to predict the movements of Mars and the Sun, which placed the Sun at the center of our solar system.

Seventeen natural sites possessing ancient nuclear reactions have now been found: evidence of Earth's first nuclear reactor.

From here to the limits of what we can see, here's a breathtaking illustrated logarithmic view of the Universe.

A wormhole is like a tunnel between two distant points in our universe that cuts the travel time from one point to the other.

Although most people can name Einstein's most famous equation, E = mc², very few people can explain what it means.

There are between 6 and 20 trillion galaxies out there. Carl Sagan's "billions and billions" was far too low of a guess.

When we measure it, we find that our Universe really is flat. Here's what we can learn from that, and why it matters so much.

Today, the fastest-ever nova to fall off has been discovered, and even faster ones may be out there. What comes next?

The mega drive might provide enough thrust for a spacecraft to travel near the speed of light using only electricity, says one physicist.

An analysis of the gravitational wave data from black hole mergers show that the event horizon area, and entropy, always increases.

Why some people are considered geniuses while other equally impressive people are not seems largely arbitrary.

Researchers observed an ultra-rare particle interaction that reveals the half-life of a xenon-124 atom to be 18 sextillion years.

A first-of-its-kind quantum simulator could lead to the creation of never-before-seen materials powered by quantum phenomena.

Protons and neutrons in an atom’s nucleus can be arranged in different configurations, creating nuclear isomers.

If no solution is found, we're already stuck with some 22,000 cubic meters of long-lasting hazardous waste.

Saturn's Iapetus, discovered way back in 1671, has three bizarre features that science still can't fully explain.

By flying planes both with and against Earth's rotation, and returning them all to the same starting point, we tested Einstein's theory.

The sheer amount of stuff already floating in space makes the domino effect of explosions a likely possibility.

The researchers' findings will help scientists trace a black hole’s evolution as it feeds on stellar material.

Scientists knew that it would probably explode, but they did not expect to reach such a record magnetic field.

The world's biggest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), is back online after a three-year hiatus.

A new study suggests we use the orbit of the Moon to find gravitational waves we can’t currently detect in other ways.

A team of scientists have shattered the record for the amount of energy produced during a controlled, sustained fusion reaction.

By using quantum physics to measure magnetic fields, researchers are pushing closer to measuring the brain in ways we couldn't before.

We know that fusion works – it is the process that powers the Sun, providing heat and light to the Earth. But can we do it ourselves?

“When I saw the data, I didn’t believe the analysis...This is the brightest Cow supernova seen to date."

Scientists used to think the universe began from a singularity. Nearly 100 years later, we're not so sure.

Physicists claim to have generated matter from pure light particles for the first time — a spectacular display of Einstein's most famous equation.

The first direct observation of light from behind a supermassive black hole confirms a prediction in Einstein’s theory of general relativity.

NASA’s new balloon-borne telescope could let astronomers study distant objects with the latest tech at a fraction of the cost of Hubble.

The muon, a fundamental particle nicknamed the “fat electron,” has physicists questioning the standard model of particle physics.

A quantum teleportation breakthrough at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory puts us one step closer to a super-fast, super-secure quantum internet.

Generative adversarial networks are the scary AI producing deepfakes. But they have other uses too, and physicists are starting to harness their power.

MIT researchers have created a new kind of atomic clock that exploits quantum entanglement to keep time more precisely.