Latest Articles
What Is Dark Energy? The Force Accelerating the Universe’s Expansion
In 1998, two independent teams of astronomers studying distant supernovae made a discovery that upended cosmology. They expected to find that the universe‘s expansion was slowing down, pulled back by the gravity of all the matter within it. Instead, they found the opposite: the expansion of the universe is accelerating. Something is pushing space apart…
Proxima Centauri b: Our Nearest Known Exoplanet and What It Could Mean for Life
The nearest star to the Sun is Proxima Centauri, a red dwarf 4.24 light-years away in the constellation Centaurus. In 2016, astronomers announced that Proxima Centauri hosts a planet, Proxima Centauri b, orbiting squarely within the star’s habitable zone. No other confirmed exoplanet is closer to Earth. If any world beyond our solar system were…
Hawking Radiation Explained: How Black Holes Slowly Evaporate
Black holes are defined by the impossibility of escape. Nothing that crosses the event horizon, the boundary of no return, can ever get out. That is the foundational property of a black hole, derived directly from general relativity. Yet in 1974, Stephen Hawking used quantum mechanics to show that black holes do emit radiation. They…
The Higgs Boson Explained: The Particle That Gives Everything Mass
On July 4, 2012, physicists at CERN announced one of the most anticipated discoveries in the history of science. After nearly fifty years of searching, they had found the Higgs boson, a particle so fundamental to the workings of the universe that it had been called, somewhat controversially, the “God particle.” The announcement came from…
How Black Holes Form: Stellar Collapse, Mergers, and the Early Universe
A black hole is not a thing in the ordinary sense; it is a region of spacetime where gravity has become so extreme that nothing, not even light, can escape once it crosses the event horizon. Understanding what a black hole is requires understanding how it forms. And the answer turns out to depend entirely…
Falsifiability Explained: How Karl Popper Defined the Boundary of Science
In 1919, Karl Popper noticed something that bothered him about several popular theories of the time. Freudian psychoanalysis, Adlerian psychology, and Marxist historical theory all shared a curious property: they could explain anything. Whatever happened, the theories could accommodate it. A patient improved, the theory explained it. A patient got worse, the theory explained that…
