Videos

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  I See a Darkness: Perlmutter on Discovering Dark Energy

  In 1997, physicist Saul Perlmutter was studying supernova explosions in order to get a sense of how fast the universe was expanding. But what he and his team discovered was...

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  How Many Stars Are There in the Sky?

  Travel back in time as Galileo Galilei (played by Mike Francis) relates the story of when he first turned his telescope to the sky in order to count the stars—and finds the task...

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  Building a Better Spyglass

  Galileo Galilei built his first telescope not for astronomy, but as a tool to see distant objects, such as ships, from afar. He realized the strategic advantage of this, and with...

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  Of Stars and Crystalline Spheres

  As Galileo observed the planet Jupiter through his telescope, he noticed the “stars” surrounding it were behaving strangely. Here Mike Francis, playing the role of Galileo, acts...

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  SETI: What Are We Looking For?

  When we’re searching for extraterrestrial life, what exactly are we looking for? Or listening for? Signals in the noise. Anything that doesn’t match the pattern of nature....

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  Black Holes and Holographic Worlds

  Black holes are gravitational behemoths that dramatically twist space and time. Recently, they’ve also pointed researchers to a remarkable proposal—that everything we see may...

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  Astronomy’s New Messengers

  Marcia Bartusiak joins Kip Thorne, Laura Danly and Rainer Weiss to demonstrate how two observatories on opposite sides of the country, called LIGO (Laser Interferometer...

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  What the Binary Pulsar Can Tell Us

  A neutron star is a rotating, superdense, dead star. A pulsar is a type of neutron star that must be both magnetized and moving very fast, because it spins its magnetic field fast...

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  When Black Holes Collide

  When two black holes spiral towards each other and collide, they produce powerful gravitational waves. Scientists do not know much about these waves right now, but within about a...

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  The Sound of Ancient Gravity

  “Binary inspiral” refers to a binary system (with two neutron stars or black holes, for example) where the two objects are spiraling in towards each other. The two bodies about to...

Blog Posts

• On Seeing Further

  The history of astronomy can be read as a story of better and better vision. Over the centuries, we have supplemented our vision with technology that allows us to see further and more clearly; while Ancient astronomers, who relied only on their naked eyes to perceive the...

• Science’s Most Elusive Women: Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin & the Women of Harvard Observatory

  The final installment of this series on science's elusive women will focus on English-American astronomer Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin and the women of Harvard Observatory. Payne-Gaposchkin was the first scientist to assert, against conventional wisdom at the time, that stars are...

• Your Zodiac Remains Unchanged, Still Not Based in Scientific Fact

  Yesterday, I went on Facebook. Not an unusual activity for someone my age. Or for someone my parents’ age, which I still haven’t gotten used to. But that’s not the point of this. Several of my “friends” had statuses mentioning "Ophiuchus", whatever that is. One girl’s panicked...