Astronomy

Military strategists use game theory to evaluate possible strategies—but there are limits to what this approach to decision-making can achieve

A dispute over how to divvy up the pot in an interrupted game of chance led early mathematicians to invent modern risk assessment

Cherenkov radiation isn't just a beautiful phenomenon. It turns up in nuclear reactors, in the upper atmosphere, in gamma ray telescopes on three continents, in a cubic kilometer of Antarctic ice, and in hospital imaging suites. Here's what a light boom is actually good for.

Nope, that is not an alien spaceship landing on the Moon! This is an image of

Why does Comet R3 (PanSTARRS) have a wispy tail?

The clouds may look like an oyster, and the stars like pearls, but look beyond.

Comet R3 is brightening rapidly -- will it survive?

Near the eastern horizon before sunrise, Comet C/2025 R3

For decades, the mathematician Frank Merle has been embracing the messy math behind lasers and fluids

Using lunar regolith simulant, a team of researchers demonstrated that "immature" regolith similar to what is expected around the Moon's southern polar region is suitable for rovers to drive on.

The world of peptides has exploded in wellness circles, but the benefits of injecting these gray-market molecules rest on little clinical evidence

Quantum science and AI research are big winners just a year after the U.S. funding giant slashed its Graduate Research Fellowship Program awards in half

We have the crowd. We have the star. Now it's time to put them together. Here's exactly what happens — and why — when a charged particle outruns the local speed of light in a material. Also: why it's always blue.

In 2014, a strange cloudy object called G2 made a close approach to Sagittarius A*, (Sag A*) the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way Galaxy. Astronomers were pretty excited, partly because they thought it might get torn apart by Sag A*'s intense gravitational pull. That didn't happen, and the event was a cosmic fizzle. Instead, G2 skipped around the black hole. Various observations showed that it wasn't just a gas cloud. It was likely a dusty protostellar object encased in a dusty cloud. Or perhaps several merged stars. But, it survived the flyby and continued on a shortened orbit.

Understanding the beginning of the solar system requires us to look at some very strange places. One such place is at the so-called “Trojan” asteroids that share Jupiter’s orbit in front of and behind it. But for a long time, these cosmic time capsules have held a mystery for astronomers: why are they color-coded? The populations of larger asteroids are very clear split into two distinct groups - the “reds” and the “less reds”, because apparently they’re all red to some extent. A new paper from researchers in Japan tried to solve this mystery by taking a close look at even smaller asteroids, and their findings, published in a recent edition of The Astronomical Journal, actually brings up a completely different question - why don’t smaller Trojan asteroids have the same color-coding?

Electric vehicles could store renewable energy when there is excess supply and give it back to the grid when demand peaks, but car companies disagree on the best way to do that

Electric vehicles could store renewable energy when there is excess supply and give it back to the grid when demand peaks, but car companies disagree on the best way to do that