Around a supermassive black hole, smaller black holes collide extra strangely
Take three black holes and throw them into the disk surrounding a supermassive black hole and things get really weird, really fast.
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Pristine asteroid Ryugu contains amino acids that are building blocks of life
Samples from asteroid Ryugu are the most pristine pieces of our solar system ever studied and contain amino acids that could have given rise to life on Earth.
3 Revolutionary Women of Mathematics
From the profound revelations of the shape of space to the furthest explorations reachable by imagination and logic, the history of mathematics has always been seen as a masculine endeavor. Names like Gauss, Euler, Riemann, Poincare, Erdős, and the more modern Wiles, Tao, Perelman, and Zhang, all of them associated with the most beautiful mathematics discovered since … Read more
Meteor streaks through Jupiter’s atmosphere as NASA spacecraft watches
When a rogue meteor careened through the atmosphere of Jupiter last year, it caught the attention of NASA’s Juno spacecraft in orbit around the giant planet. The brief and sudden flash in Jupiter’s upper atmosphere was spotted by NASA’s Juno spacecraft in April 2020. But, while the burst of light didn’t last long, it drew … Read more
When Is It Safe to Have Sex after COVID?
Recently, my husband endured a mild case of COVID—a cough, a sore throat, some aches and fatigue. Fortunately, he is vaccinated and boosted, and he recovered quickly. On day 10 after infection, he produced a negative rapid antigen test. Cool! So when can we have sex? This, it turns out, is a more complicated question … Read more
An Earthlike planet may be orbiting in a dead star’s ‘habitable zone’
Planetary debris, including some objects the size of moons, may hint at a rocky exoplanet within the habitable zone of a stellar zombie, a new study suggests. The star in question is a white dwarf called WD1054–226, a cooling remnant of a star that exhausted all fuel at its core. If an exoplanet is confirmed … Read more
How Coin Flipping Can Make Polls More Accurate
After the noisy 2020 election season in the United States, journalists wrote extensively about the inaccuracy of preelection polls. They weren’t the only ones. According to a report by the American Association for Public Opinion Research entitled 2020 Pre-Election Polling: An Evaluation of the 2020 General Election Polls, 2020 polls were off by the largest … Read more
MacBook Pro 16-inch (2021) review
Whether you’re a skywatcher looking for something to edit their photos of the night sky on, or you just need something to watch sci-fi movies on, the Macbook Pro 16-inch is a fantastic laptop. Apple’s M1 chip bought huge performance gains while extending the battery life of its MacBook Pro M1 13-inch model last year, … Read more
Time Crystals Made of Light Could Soon Escape the Lab
In many respects, scientists are much like detectives, solving mysteries by sifting through evidence in search of cluelike patterns. For example, any crystal, whether a granule of table salt or a diamond necklace, is just a bunch of atoms arranged in a repeating pattern. By glimpsing only a few of the crystal’s patterned atoms, a … Read more
In the hunt for dark matter, are axions our best bet?
A composite image of the Bullet Cluster, a much-studied pair of galaxy clusters that have collided head on. One has passed through the other, like a bullet traveling through an apple, and is thought to show clear signs of dark matter (blue) separated from hot gases (pink). (Image credit: X-ray: NASA/ CXC/ CfA/ M.Markevitch, Optical … Read more