PBS
Do Neutron Stars Shine In Dark Matter?
Neutron stars aren't dark matter--we figured that out a while ago. But new research is telling us that they may be dark matter factories. They may produce the exotic axion, one of the most popular dark matter candidates.
PBS
How Can Humanity Become a Kardashev Type 1 Civilization?
Imagine a world where humanity masters every planetary resource available to it—our first step on the famous Kardeshev scale of technological advancement. How distant is that step? Will we even become a true Type-1 civilization, and how...
PBS
How Many Black Holes Are In The Solar System?
Dark matter has eluded us for many decades. Even our most advanced particle colliders and sophisticated underground detectors have come up short. But it may be that we can finally solve this mystery with a much simpler experiment,...
PBS
Does Timescapes Disprove Dark Energy?
The universe is expanding and that expansion is accelerating under the power of dark energy and eventually all matter and energy will be dispersed over such unthinkable distances that nothing can stop space from blowing up infinitely....
PBS
Why Didn’t Antimatter Destroy The Universe? (LHC Breakthrough)
At one-one-thousandth of a second after the Big Bang, the great annihilation event should have wiped out all matter, leaving a universe of only radiation. Why still don't know why any matter survived. Well, a new finding from the LHC...
PBS
Are The Fundamental Constants Finely Tuned? (The Naturalness Problem)
Did God have any choice in creating the world? So asked Albert Einstein. He was being poetic. What he really meant, was whether the universe could have been any other way. Could it have had different laws of physics, driven by different...
PBS
Can Cosmic Voids Solve The Crisis in Cosmology?
Two of the greatest mysteries in cosmology are the nature of dark energy and the apparent conflict in our measurements of the expansion rate of the early versus the modern universe that even dark energy can’t account for. Could both of...
PBS
Can the Universe Remember? Exploring Gravitational Memory
There are cosmic events so powerful that they leave permanent marks on the fabric of the universe itself. Imagine two colossal black holes spiraling into each other, yes they send ripples in the fabric of spacetime—gravitational waves...
PBS
The Crisis in Physics: Why the Higgs Boson Should Not Exist!
According to quantum physics, the universe should have collapsed on itself in the instant after the Big Bang due to all particles being 100 million billion times heavier. Recent observations of the universe existing suggest that this may...
PBS
Earth Had Rings (and Might Regain Them)
Planet Earth is the jewel of the solar system—the shimmery blue oceans, the verdant green forests, the wispy whimsical cloud formations. Saturn is the only competitor for most gorgeous planet with that giant ring system. Hmm… what if we...
PBS
Quantum Energy Teleportation is Real!
The vacuum of space is a chaotic sea of quantum fluctuations. Some have said that this vacuum energy can be harvested to build our future starship engines, or manipulated to build warp drives. It can't. But it is technically possible to...
PBS
Does Many Worlds Explain Quantum Probabilities?
The mystery of what happens when we go from a superposition to a definite state is known as the Measurement Problem, and it’s arguably the most mysterious outstanding problem in physics. The different interpretations of quantum mechanics...
PBS
Interstellar Expansion Without Faster Than Light Travel
In the far future we may have advanced propulsion technologies like matter-antimatter engines and compact fusion drives that allow humans to travel to other stars on timescales shorter than their own lives. But what if those technologies...
PBS
Is Our Model of Dark Energy Wrong?
The biggest news in cosmology in recent years is that the mysterious universe-accelerating entity we call dark energy may be fading away. The evidence for this is now strong enough that enormous effort is going into confirming this...
PBS
Is Gravity Random Not Quantum?
The holy grail of theoretical physics is to find the long-sought theory of quantum gravity. But what if this theory is as mythical as the grail of legend? What if gravity isn’t weirdly quantum at all, but rather … just a bit messy? Or...
PBS
How To Detect Faster Than Light Travel
Warp drives may or may not be possible, but if they are then could a distant alien civilization’s warp fields produce gravitational waves that we could see here on Earth? According to a recent study.. Actually maybe, at least eventually....
PBS
What if Humans Are Not Earth's First Civilization? (Silurian Hypothesis)
We’re almost certainly the first technological civilization on Earth. But what if we’re not? We are. Although how sure are we, really? The Silurian hypothesis, which asks whether pre-human industrial civilizations might have existed.
PBS
Was the Gravitational Wave Background Finally Discovered?
A few weeks ago a large team of gravitational wave astronomers announced something pretty wild. The moderately confident detection of pervasive ripples in the fabric of space time that presumably fills the cosmos, detected by watching...
SciShow
JWST Made a Cosmological Crisis Worse
Astronomers have two main ways to calculate how fast the universe is expanding. Unfortunately, they don't agree with one another. The JWST was supposed to help solve this discrepancy, known as "The Hubble Tension" or "The Crisis in...
MinutePhysics
Where Do Galaxies Come From?
Thanks to the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) and NASA's James Webb Space Telescope for supporting this video! In particular, thanks to Dan Coe of STScI for taking the time to chat with me about what we do and don't know about...
SciShow
The Universe’s Second, Bigger Bang
In 2023, a team of researchers proposed that our universe experienced not one, but TWO Big Bangs about a month apart from one another. The first for the stuff described by our Standard Model of Particle Physics. And the second for that...
SciShow
Our Galaxy May Be 10 Times Bigger Than We Thought
The Milky Way is often described as measuring 100,000 light years across and containing the mass of a trillion Suns. But our home galaxy is actually far bigger, and might be much less massive. Astronomers aren't sure what the exact stats...
SciShow
Were Humans Destined to Exist?
This is a snippet of a larger conversation taking place on Crash Course Pods: The Universe. Over 11 episodes, John Green and Katie Mack walk through the entire history of the universe…even the parts that aren’t written yet.
SciShow
This Light is a Different Kind of Invisible
Dark matter's most famous trait is its inability to interact with light, the particle version of which we call "photons". But in their attempts to figure out exactly what dark matter is, some scientists have proposed "dark photons".