You’re probably sitting still, right? Wrong, absolutely wrong. Not only are you on a spinning orb, but you’re also traveling around 70,000 miles per hour around a star, in a galaxy that, observations imply, is sailing through space at over a million miles per hour.
You’re looking at the center of our galactic home, the Milky Way, as imaged by 64 radio telescopes in the South African wilderness.
The arrival of pumpkin spice jokes is often seen as the first sign of fall, but a trampoline full of gravity-defying dead leaves is a far more satisfying way to welcome the arrival of cooler temps and gourd-flavored coffee.
Bad news: Humans will probably never explore the area around a black hole, at least while you’re alive. That’s mostly because most black holes are too far away, and even if we could travel to them, it’s unlikely we’d survive their gravitational pull. That means that if we want to study the wacky effects extreme…
Black holes are the strong, silent type—an age-old enigma. Hubble estimates that there are roughly 100 million black holes in our galaxy alone, but because their gravitational pull is so intense, light can’t escape. So even with the most advanced equipment,“stray” black holes wandering in space are nearly impossible…
Going to space is definitely one of the coolest things a human could ever do but damn if it doesn’t do a doozy to your body. If you were able to spend time in space, your bones would become brittle, your leg and back muscles would wither away, the back of your eyeballs might flatten, and your heart could lose mass and…
New research shows that astronauts who return from extended missions in space experience a significant weakening of their spinal muscles. Disturbingly, their back muscles don’t return to normal even after several weeks back on Earth.
Sometimes failure isn’t always a bad thing. This 19-foot tall domino tower was only ten layers away from officially becoming the second tallest in the world—but then gravity claimed yet another victim. As heartbreaking it is to see all this hard work go to waste, it’s also pretty cool to watch 241 layers of dominoes,…
Scientists at MIT have designed an ingenious new concept for a battery that operates on the same fundamental principal as an hourglass—it relies on gravity to generate energy. They described the device in a recent paper for Energy and Environmental Science.
Yes, we can. We can totally create the artificial gravity seen in movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey or Elysium, it’ll just cost a lot of freaking money and require a lot of freaking resources. Real Engineering explains how centrifugal force works as artificial gravity and estimates (using math cribbed from how much…
Forgive me, but I think it’s plausible that these two guys are actually the first mutants in the world, because the way they move so easily around this Chinese pole makes it seem like they have magnetic superpowers or access to an invisible wall. They can flip, slide, stop, walk on nothing, and do things I can’t even…
Watch as these diabolos get spun and twirled in the air like they’re being controlled by some sort of sorcery and not at the mercy of gravity. That’s how good ChihHan Chao, 2015 Red Bull PAO champion, is at using the hand sticks to juggle these crazy yo-yos. He’s making the discs dance and tossing them back and forth…
What do you get when you combine a Broadway musical about The Wizard of Oz with two giants of physics? You get “Defining Gravity,” the latest music mashup video from A Capella Science.
These colorful maps of Mars are the most accurate depiction of how gravity varies around the Red Planet. Created by measuring subtle variations in the gravitational field experienced by NASA spacecraft as they zip past the planet, the images allow us to understand what lurks inside better than ever.
We all know people don’t explode when exposed to space without protection. But science fiction has taken some ... liberties with vacuum exposure over the years. Here are 19 scenes of people being exposed to space, ranked from the least realistic to the most.
Astronomers just uncovered hundreds of hidden galaxies a mere 250 million light years away from Earth—well within our own galactic neighborhood. But how did they stay unknown for so long? The fault isn’t with them, it’s with our own Milky Way.
Just a few years ago, we were wondering where all the movies about outer space had gone. And now, we don’t have to wonder any more, because we’ve been getting a crop of fantastic new movies about astronauts, spaceships, and the joy of exploration.
Many locations along the UK, US and Australian coasts will experience their highest tides for tens of years around September 29 or 30. Coastal roads in Miami, for instance, have already been closed in anticipation of exceptional tides.
I don’t know what planet these guys are from but it’s certainly not Earth because they don’t follow the very simple laws of gravity and break the concept of balance and destroy the very idea of time. They can jump on and off a slackline like it’s nothing and even do ridiculous tricks normal people couldn’t pull off if…
