Science

Have they been here?

When we look for extraterrestrials, we often peer into the depths of space. But alien life might be closer than you think

Ravi Kopparapu & Jacob Haqq Misra

How the Moon became a place

For most of history, the Moon was regarded as a mysterious and powerful object. Then scientists made it into a destination

Danny Robb

The remarkable innovations inspired by our need to know the night sky

5 minutes

To change the way you see the Moon, view it from the Sun’s perspective

5 minutes

Stars behaving absurdly

For centuries, the only way in which to illuminate the mysteries of black holes was through the power of mathematics

Steve Nadis & Shing-Tung Yau

What does it look like to hunt for dark matter? Scenes from one frontier in the search

7 minutes

Imagining spacetime as a visible grid is an extraordinary journey into the unseen

12 minutes

His radiant formula

Stephen Hawking’s greatest legacy – a simple little equation now 50 years old – revealed a shocking aspect of black holes

Roger Highfield

The abyss at the edge of human understanding – a voyage into a black hole

4 minutes

Alien life is no joke

Not long ago the search for extraterrestrials was considered laughable nonsense. Today, it’s serious and scientific

Adam Frank

The history of astronomy is a history of conjuring intelligent life where it isn’t

34 minutes

Seven years later, what can we make of our first confirmed interstellar visitor?

59 minutes

Why the golden age of total solar eclipses is already behind us

5 minutes

Panspermia

It’s possible that frozen worlds with subterranean oceans are incubators of organic life. But then how did life get here?

Balazs Bradak

Uncertain contact

The detection of alien life won’t be obvious. It’ll be partial and inconclusive: a perfect task for the scientific method

Jaime Green

In the search for life, might alien ocean worlds be a better bet than Earth-like planets?

5 minutes

Cosmic vision

By showing us a new cosmos, the discoveries of the James Webb Space Telescope will ripple through our moral universe

Claire Isabel Webb

There’s no planet B

The scientific evidence is clear: the only celestial body that can support us is the one we evolved with. Here’s why

Arwen E Nicholson & Raphaëlle D Haywood

Bat-people on the Moon – what a famed 1835 hoax reveals about misinformation today

8 minutes

Thriving on Mars

Dust storms, long distances and freezing temperatures make living on Mars magnificently challenging. How will we do it?

Simon Morden

Inventing heaven

For hundreds of years, Christians knew exactly where heaven was: above us and above the stars. Then came the new cosmologists

Stephen Case

How one of history’s most beautiful books was used to find fate in the cosmos

6 minutes

Telescopes on the Moon

Our future in space relies on settling the Moon and using it as a base to probe the deepest questions in the cosmos

Joseph Silk

Raw solar-storm footage is the punk-rock antidote to sleek James Webb imagery

6 minutes