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On August 21, for the first time in 99 years, a total solar eclipse will cut through the entire continental United States. It’s going to be awesome. If you’re in the bull’s eye center of the moon’s shadow known as the totality — the sky will go dark for a few minutes in the middle of the day, stars will appear, birds will become confused and start chirping their nighttime songs. And it’s all because of a cosmic coincidence: From the Earth, both the moon and sun appear to be roughly the same size. Most of the country will see...

Planet watchers have plenty to occupy themselves this month. Mars, being too close to the sun, is the only naked eye planet that is not observable. Jupiter will be the first “star” that becomes visible after sunset. It will be low in the southwest. It is so very bright that it can be seen in twilight, but how soon can you detect it? It can be fun to test just how early you can see it. The moon passes close to Jupiter on July 28 making for a pretty grouping. Saturn is up all night this month. It doesn’t get...

FORT HUACHUCA - Ted Forte, Ken Duncan, and Bob Gent met at Colonel Smith Middle School recently and young astronomers observed the planet Venus, the moon, and the sun through their telescopes. The trio also brought the Planetary Science Institute's meteorite kit, and student scientists studied pieces of Mars and a rare and beautiful Pallasite meteorite. Later that evening, they drove to Faras Elementary School near Douglas, and Rick Burke joined Forte, Duncan, and Gent. “The seeing was good, and we observed the moon, Jupiter and other wonders of the night sky,” Gent said.

American astronauts may be walking on Mars in the next eight years, or ideally the next four, if President Donald Trump has his way. But the new timetable has baffled experts in space travel. (AUDIO-AT-LINK) The surprise announcement — or rather instruction — took place this week during a live video conference between President Trump and veteran astronaut Peggy Whitson, who is currently aboard the International Space Station. During the conversation, Trump asked Whitson when it would be possible to send a human to Mars. She gave a careful and detailed answer explaining that a trip to the Red Planet...

Shaq, a college graduate, defended Kyrie, saying: “It’s true. The Earth is flat. Listen, I drive from coast to coast, and this sh*t is flat to me. You mean to tell me that China is under us? It’s not. The world is flat.” One of Shaq’s podcast co-hosts refuted his assertion by saying, “We’ve seen the Earth from satellite imagery.” Shaq replied by saying that could be manipulated. To buttress his statement, Shaq pointed to the inaccuracies taught in school, such as the theory that Christopher Columbus had discovered America.

Shia Labeouf just can’t catch a break can he? His first attempt at setting up a 24/7, 4-year livestream was abandoned by the Museum of the Moving image after barely a month. The museum cited Shia’s arrest after he allegedly assaulted a Trump supporter, but others speculate it was the growing number of people that threatened to report the museum for violating their tax exemption status by banning Trump supporters from the installation. LaBeouf then relocated it to a Holocaust museum in Albuquerque, New Mexico but that was also quickly shut down in less than two weeks after shots were...

The hunt for potentially habitable planets outside of our solar system is one of the most exciting frontiers of science, and you can become a part of it without ever having to leave the comfort of your own home. This week, MIT and Carnegie Science Institute released a huge dataset containing close to 61,000 measurements of over 1600 stars. These measurements contain data that could potentially identify thousands of new exoplanets, many of which might be Earth-like in their nature. Unfortunately, the MIT and Carnegie Institute team simply doesn’t have the capacity to trawl through all of this information,...

The scientific community remained silent for too long, accepting populism into the strict environment of cold blooded facts. The old have betrayed the young, teaching them that facts should not always come first. On the contrary, facts are the only relevant aspect in science.

The Supermoon on November 14, 2016, will be the closest a Full Moon has been to Earth since January 26, 1948. The next time a Full Moon is even closer to Earth will be on November 25, 2034 (dates based on UTC time).

Here are a few ways that humanity may be able to leave the cradle of Earth. The field equations of Einstein’s General Relativity theory say that faster-than-light (FTL) travel is possible, so a handful of researchers are working to see whether a Star Trek-style warp drive, or perhaps a kind of artificial wormhole, could be created through our technology. But even if shown feasible tomorrow, it’s possible that designs for an FTL system could be as far ahead of a functional starship as Leonardo da Vinci’s 16th century drawings of flying machines were ahead of the Wright Flyer of 1903....

Meteor showers are associated with streams of debris left behind by comets. The Perseids are dust bits from Comet Swift-Tuttle and are famous for creating bright fireballs and elevated meteor activity for nearly two weeks in mid-August. This year it is predicted the shower will peak on the overnight of Thursday, Aug. 11, to Friday, Aug. 12. It is predicted to be twice the usual intensity. That’s because Earth will pass through the center of the debris stream rather than the grazing encounter we experience in most years. The display should be well worth the loss of a few hours’...

So... it could still get us to Mars in 70 days? Physicists have just published a new paper that suggests the controversial EM drive - or electromagnetic drive - could actually work, and doesn't defy Newton's third law after all. In case you've missed the hype, here's a quick catch-up: a lot of space lovers are freaking out about the EM drive because of claims it could get humans to Mars in just 10 weeks, but just as many are sick of hearing about it, because, on paper at least, it doesn't work within the laws of physics. Despite that...

Every now and then, a distant star called KIC 8462852 dims by as much as 20 percent. That's huge. Even a passing planet as big as Jupiter would only block about 1 percent of the star's light. Ruling out a planet, scientists have no idea what could be eclipsing the star (which is informally known as 'Tabby's Star'). The leading hypothesis is a family of really big comets, but that doesn't quite fit. Astronomer Jason Wright pointed out that the light patterns are consistent with what we'd expect if aliens had built a Dyson swarm of solar collectors around the...

It takes a bold person to declare that interstellar travel is now within our grasp. Physicist Stephen Hawking has shown that he is just that, taking part in the Breakthrough Starshot initiative. The project has announced a $100m research programme to investigate the technology of using light to propel spacecraft out of the solar system to explore neighbouring stars. For the first time in human history, interstellar travel is a realistic and achievable aspiration, and not just the playground of science fiction. So what has changed that makes interstellar travel achievable? First of all, clear expectations. This is not about...

Periodic mass extinctions on Earth, as indicated in the global fossil record, could be linked to a suspected ninth planet, according to research published by a faculty member of the University of Arkansas Department of Mathematical Sciences. Daniel Whitmire, a retired professor of astrophysics now working as a math instructor, published findings in the January issue of Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society that the as yet undiscovered "Planet X" triggers comet showers linked to mass extinctions on Earth at intervals of approximately 27 million years. Though scientists have been looking for Planet X for 100 years, the possibility...

The travel time from Earth to Mars using current space flight technologies is estimated to be 9 months. Last week, an innovative concept was proposed which claims to reduce the time that will be spent for Mars travel to merely three days through so-called photonic propulsion technology. But a new proposal threatens to radically shorten this period to an astounding 30 minutes. The idea was revealed by Phillip Lubin, who is a physics professor at the University of California Santa Barbara. Lubin was also responsible for the photonic propulsion technology proposal. This time, however, he identified the use of high-powered...

Neil deGrasse Tyson @neiltyson "People who are anti-Trump are actually anti-Trump supporters — they oppose free citizens voting for the @realDonaldTrump."

One of the most spectacular discoveries of the 20th century was that the Universe itself was expanding. When Einstein put forth his general theory of relativity, he swiftly recognized that there was a consequence he was unhappy about: a Universe that was filled with matter in all directions would be unstable against gravitational collapse. Einstein’s fix for this was to make up an invisible, outward-pushing force that prevented this collapse from occurring, a cosmological constant. But if you didn’t include this cosmological constant, others soon realized, you’d wind up with a Universe that wasn’t static in time, but where the...

John Shannon, who lives in Homestead, Florida, was leaving his house on February 11th to go to work. At 5:55AM, the morning sky was still black, and when he looked up he saw an amazing sight. As you can see in the video, it starts out like a beautiful falling meteor shower and then becomes something completely different. Very, very different.