A nasty sort of bias called Malmquist bias affects almost every astronomical survey, and the only solution is to…keep doing surveys.
Continue reading “The Hardest Bias in Astronomy”Life Needs Black Holes to Survive
Life is rare, and it requires exactly the right environmental mix to establish itself. And there’s one surprising contributor to that perfect mix: gigantic black holes.
Continue reading “Life Needs Black Holes to Survive”What Makes a Supercluster?
By eye, it’s impossible to pick out the exact boundaries of the superclusters, which are among the largest structures in the universe. But that’s because they are not defined by their edges, but by the common motion of their components.
Continue reading “What Makes a Supercluster?”Is Science Slowing Down?
Paradoxically, even though we produce more scientific output than ever before – each year, researchers around the world publish millions of academic papers – the pace of scientific discovery is slowing down.
Continue reading “Is Science Slowing Down?”The Universe is on the Move
Our universe is defined by the way it moves, and one way to describe the history of science is through our increasing awareness of the restlessness of the cosmos.
Continue reading “The Universe is on the Move”The Knowledge We Don’t Yet Have
We have gained so much powerful knowledge in the past few hundred years. But there’s still so much that we don’t know.
Continue reading “The Knowledge We Don’t Yet Have”Could We Ever Harness Quantum Vacuum Energy?
The fabric of spacetime is roiling with vibrating quantum fields, known as the vacuum energy. It’s right there, everywhere we look. Could we ever get anything out of it?
Continue reading “Could We Ever Harness Quantum Vacuum Energy?”The Secrets Hiding in the Vacuum
Empty space is nothing but. According to the weird rules of quantum mechanics, it’s actually filled with an endless amount of energy, known appropriately enough as vacuum energy.
Continue reading “The Secrets Hiding in the Vacuum”The Seeming Impossibility of Life
The number of near misses, false starts, and legitimate disasters that have befallen our species since the day we took our first upright steps all those generations ago is too large to count and could honestly take up this entire book. I’ll give us humans this much, though: we’re survivors, through and through.
Continue reading “The Seeming Impossibility of Life”Is the Habitable Zone Really Habitable?
The water that life knows and needs, the water that makes a world habitable, the water that acts as the universal solvent for all the myriad and fantastically complicated chemical reactions that make us different than the dirt and rocks, can only come in one form: liquid.
Continue reading “Is the Habitable Zone Really Habitable?”