It’s shadow time, baby! Soon, people living in North America will get to experience their first solar eclipse in almost a decade. Even though the last solar eclipse in North America happened in 2017, the next one isn’t expected until August 2044, so seizing this moment is critical. More than just a peculiar shadow, the … Read more
A total solar eclipse is coming to North America on April 8. The Great North American Eclipse, as it has been dubbed, will be visible across 13 US States, plus parts of Mexico and eastern Canada. But it will not look the same for everybody. For those living along the path of totality—the projection of … Read more
But the solar system contains more than two masses. In fact, it started as a big cloud of dust without any planets and without the sun, and every speck of dust had an attractive interaction with every other speck. That’s a lot of complicated stuff going on, but there’s a trick we can use to … Read more
Illustration: Rhett Allain You can see that we have a right triangle with the hypotenuse equal to the distance from the observer’s eyes to the center of the Earth (R + h), with the other two sides being just R and the distance to the horizon (s). Using the Pythagorean theorem, we can solve for … Read more
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That was a surprise—and a possible indication that something crucial was missing in those models: magnetism. Stellar Symmetry Last year, Gang Li, an asteroseismologist now at KU Leuven, went digging through Kepler’s giants. He was searching for a mixed-mode signal that recorded the magnetic field in the core of a red giant. “Astonishingly, I actually found … Read more
To make maps of these structures, astronomers turn to individual stars. Each star’s composition records its birthplace, age, and natal ingredients, so studying starlight enables a form of galactic cartography—as well as genealogy. By situating stars in time and place, astronomers can retrace history and infer how the Milky Way was built, piece by piece, … Read more
Like any object, black holes take time to grow and form. And like a 6-foot-tall toddler, Fan’s supersize black holes were too big for their age—the universe wasn’t old enough for them to have accrued billions of suns of heft. To explain those overgrown toddlers, physicists were forced to consider two distasteful options. Decades ago, … Read more
The next eclipse on the horizon will be the total eclipse of April 8, 2024, when the moon will be a bit closer and appear a bit larger. That cosmic display will be seen across large swaths of North America. Its path of totality will pass through at least four Mexican states, Texas, part of … Read more
NASA’s Psyche spacecraft blasted off this morning at 10:20 am Eastern time and is now en route to its namesake metal-rich asteroid. The long-delayed mission will examine the asteroid with a suite of scientific instruments and determine whether the hunk of rock was the core of a baby planet that never fully formed. But that’s … Read more
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The unique model of this story appeared in Quanta Journal. Of the 100 trillion neutrinos that cross via you each second, most come from the solar or Earth’s environment. However a smattering of the particles—these transferring a lot quicker than the remaining—traveled right here from highly effective sources farther away. For many years, astrophysicists have … Read more