From snazzy banded agates to volcanic elephants, there are some pretty weird rocks out there. But the weirdest ones geologists find might be those that fall from space. One of them called the Hypatia stone, it might be, the strangest of them all. In fact, all signs currently suggest that this rock’s origin story is … Read more
While travelling in space, one of the hardest things to do is to stop or change direction. Without anything to push against or friction to slow things down, spacecraft need to do all the hard work of changing their speed or path by there thrusters. And sometimes they do that in ways you would never … Read more
Black holes are among the most fascinating objects in our universe and also the most mysterious. A black hole is a region in space where the force of gravity is so strong not even light the fastest known entity in our universe can escape. The boundary of A black hole is called the event horizon a point of no return beyond which … Read more
Although it might not seem obvious when you look at the night sky, but we live in a universe that is expanding faster by the instant. Every day, stars fall over the horizon of what we can see, as the space between us stretches faster than their light can reach us. And we can never know what exists past … Read more
Even though nobody else will be around to see it, scientists are fascinated by the end of the universe. It is kind of like the Big Bang there’s just something so interesting about knowing where your atoms came from and where they are ultimately going to go in billions of years. Right now, there are a few ideas about how everything … Read more
Whether it’s Star Trek, Stargate or Babylon 5 wormholes have been showing up in science fiction for a long time. They are just a super convenient tunnel to another part of the universe, a way for sci-fi writers to send their characters across huge distances in the blink of an eye. And it turns out that they are not … Read more
When people talk about black holes, there is one thing that pretty much always comes up is that Black holes get their name because the infinitely tiny, infinitely dense point in the centre has a gravitational pull so strong that even light can’t escape. The thing is, that might not always be true. For the past half-century — basically, … Read more
One of the most annoying nuisances of the modern world is heading out for something important and then getting stuck in a traffic jam. However, if You are proactive and plan your journey well ahead of time, situations involving those infuriating traffic jams can, in fact, be avoided. There are a number of tools that can provide a general idea about traffic conditions in … Read more
White holes are almost definitely not a real thing that can be found in nature. In theory, white holes are black holes that are going backwards. In theory. A black hole, as you know, is a giant object that sucks stuff into a singularity – a single point of infinite density – from which there is no escape. So a white … Read more
Detonating a nuclear bomb seems like a risky business in general, but in the early 1960s, the US and the Soviet Union were busy trying to figure out what would happen if you set one off in space? The answer turned out to be something they didn’t really expect. A nuclear blast could cause a high-altitude electromagnetic pulse or EMP, a … Read more
In all of World War Two, the world used about 5 megatons of explosives. But now, a single American Ohio Class submarine can carry 24 Trident II missiles. Only one Trident II missile capable of carrying 12 nuclear warheads together equivalent in power to about 5 megatons of explosives. A single submarine can carry a … Read more
In the outskirts of our solar system, billions of kilometres past Pluto, there might be a mysterious planet lurking in the abyss. The hypothetical body is known as Planet X or Planet Nine, and some astronomers have been trying to prove its existence for a good chunk of the last decade. It’s believed that the … Read more
The universe is everything from the tiniest particles to the largest galaxies to the very existence of space-time and life. But how did it all begin? The origin of the universe is the origin of everything. Multiple scientific theories plus creation myths from around the world have tried to explain its mysterious Genesis. However, the most widely accepted explanation is the Big Bang Theory. … Read more
In ancient times humans studied the night sky and discovered the worlds of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. But beyond this realm of knowledge, another world shined brightly just waiting to be discovered. Uranus is the seventh planet from the Sun, from a distance of about 20 astronomical units or 20 times the distance between Earth and the Sun. Uranus orbits the … Read more
How does a space probe like Voyager 2 which was launched in 1977 visit the four outer planets and travel over 17 billion kilometres over space with almost next there nothing in the way of fuel? By the time Voyager 2 had reached Neptune it had swung by Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus travelled 7 billion kilometres and was still … Read more