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Magnetars: The Most Magnetic Objects in the Known Universe
Imagine an object the size of a city with the mass of the Sun, spinning several times per second, wrapped in a magnetic field a million billion times stronger than a refrigerator magnet. At the surface, the magnetic field would be strong enough to distort the electron clouds around atoms, fundamentally changing the chemistry of…
Panspermia: Could Life Have Traveled Between the Stars?
Life on Earth arose roughly 3.5 to 4 billion years ago, perhaps within a few hundred million years of the planet becoming habitable. That is fast. Geologically, almost suspiciously fast. And that speed has prompted a persistent and scientifically serious question: did life originate here, or did the seeds of life arrive from somewhere else?…
The RNA World Hypothesis: How Life May Have Started
The origin of life is one of the most profound unsolved problems in science. How did chemistry become biology? How did non-living molecules begin to copy themselves, evolve, and eventually build the complex molecular machinery of even the simplest cell? One of the most compelling current frameworks for answering that question is the RNA World…
The Great Filter: Why the Universe May Be Silent
The universe is roughly 13.8 billion years old. It contains at least 200 billion galaxies, each with hundreds of billions of stars. Many of those stars have planets. Some of those planets orbit in habitable zones. The raw ingredients for life — carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus, sulfur — are among the most abundant elements…
The Cosmic Microwave Background: Light from the Edge of the Observable Universe
Look out into space far enough, and you will hit a wall. Not a physical barrier, but an epoch, a moment in the universe‘s history when it was so hot and dense that it was opaque. But we can detect the glow of that wall itself. The cosmic microwave background (CMB) is the oldest light…
Gravitational Waves: How Ripples in Spacetime Changed Astronomy
On September 14, 2015, at 5:51 a.m. Eastern time, two black holes collided 1.3 billion light-years away. Seven milliseconds later, a signal arrived at the LIGO detector in Livingston, Louisiana, and then at the Hanford, Washington detector: a pattern of stretching and squeezing in spacetime so tiny that it displaced the detectors’ mirrors by a…
