Search
Astronomy
Introducing Big Think’s first-ever poster — a stunningly detailed infographic of the universe from its earliest moments to the present day.
This 11-point scale aims to reduce the number of "false alarm" sightings so scientists can focus on harder-to-explain reports.
The Universe took a great many steps to create not just life, but intelligent life, here at home. What can we say about life beyond Earth?
Vast arrays of planets, stars, black holes, galaxies, and more populate our Universe. Within each category, differences can be astounding.
Contracting gas clouds don't just make a single star, but a spectrum, with all different masses. Early on, that spectrum differed. But why?
It's the Universe's ultimate chicken-and-egg question: what came first, the galaxy or the black hole? One Little Red Dot proves the answer.
In 2016, humanity announced our first successful gravitational wave detection. 10 years and 389 events later, here's how far we've come.
The Astro2020 decadal report set the USA's agenda for space and ground-based astronomy. Here in 2026, we're clearly on the wrong course.
Despite all that we've discovered, Earth remains the only planet definitively known to possess life. Here's how to find a second example.
Astronomers study our cosmic history through stellar and galactic archaeology. But we can't conduct archaeology in space. At least, not yet.
Light pollution now steals a pristine night sky from the majority of humanity. The rise of LED lighting, primarily since 2014, is to blame.
Messier 77 is one of the largest nearby spiral galaxies, with an active, brilliant core. Here's what JWST's incomparable eyes saw inside it.
A relatively tiny world in the Kuiper belt, just 500 km in diameter, has an atmosphere after all, joining Pluto. Here's what we know today.
Only nearby objects appear to the naked eye. With telescopes of all types, especially in space, we've smashed those records many times over.
Triton is Neptune's largest moon today, but it was once the undisputed king of the Kuiper belt. Here's why the outer solar system matters.
There's a lot of room in interplanetary, interstellar, and intergalactic space, but just how low the densities go is truly mind-boggling.
In 2006, the IAU defined "planet" for the first time, excluding Pluto and all other dwarf planets. In 2026, is it now time for a change?
From within our own galaxy to behemoths billions of light-years away, supermassive black holes create jets like nothing else in the cosmos.
In 2006, Pluto was controversially demoted to "dwarf planet" by the IAU. Unless you ignore most of astrophysics, it won't ever be one again.
The first colliding galaxy cluster to reveal dark matter, empirically, turns 20 this year. Here's why it cements dark matter's existence.
NASA has just sent astronauts back to the Moon for the first time since 1972 with Artemis II. So why would we cut NASA and NSF science now?
Many facts are well-known to professionals, but are unappreciated or even rejected outright by the public. "How stars work" takes the cake.
Our dream of journeying to other star systems has a big obstacle to overcome: the vast interstellar distances. Can antimatter get us there?
Although a star's "birth" is well-defined, it doesn't correspond to an ignition event in its core. Here's how stars are actually born.
From 2004 through 2017, Saturn was imaged many times and from many angles up close by Cassini. This new viral image isn't real; it's AI.
One parameter, alone, sets the dividing line between rocky planets, gas giants, brown dwarfs, stars, and much more. Here's why mass matters.
The distance ladder and the CMB give incompatible values for the expansion rate. A new study shows just how robust the Hubble tension is.
By looking at a giant, remarkable, edge-on protoplanetary system, astronomers have found a proto-protoplanet for the first time.
Human beings have now traveled farther from Earth than ever before with Artemis II's flyby of the lunar far side. Here's how it happened.
As the world teeters on the brink of nuclear war, distant, advanced civilizations would never know it. Earth appears peaceful from far away.