Franklin advanced a scientific – not supernatural – understanding of astronomical events such as eclipses. His satirical character ‘Poor Richard’ mocked those who bought into astrological predictions.
An astronomer explains how. why and when eclipses happen, what scientists can learn from them, and what they would look like if you were standing on the Moon.
What caused the Big Bang is still a mystery. And that’s just one of the many unanswered questions, in spite of everything we do know about the birth of the Universe.
Scientists have made a third detection of gravitational waves, again caused by the merger of two black holes. But they think there’s something different about the black holes in this case.
These ripples in the very fabric of the universe were hypothesized by Einstein a century ago. Now scientists have detected them for the third time in a year and a half – ushering in a new era in astrophysics.
It used to take weeks to find any of these mysterious signals from deep in space but when the new telescope started looking it found one within days. Then another.
Einstein called entanglement “spooky action at a distance”. But now it’s been used to design an incredibly sensitive detection method for gravitational waves.