Space Station Threshold

After the Big Bang, all we had was hydrogen, a little bit of helium, and a few other trace elements. Today, we’ve a whole periodic table of elements to enjoy, from oxygen we breathe to the aluminum cans we drink from to the uranium that powers some people’s homes. How did we get from plain [...]

This week we're going to study some of the most ancient objects in the entire Universe; globular clusters. These relics of the early Universe contain hundreds of thousands of stars, held together by their mutual gravity. Since they formed together, they give astronomers a unique way to test various theories of stellar evolution. Click here ...

There's a certain kind of supernova that's totally dependable. Let a white dwarf accumulate 1.4 times the mass of the Sun, and it'll detonate in an explosion visible clear across the Universe. When astronomers saw supernova 2006gz, that's what they thought they were dealing with, but hold on, the explosion was much more ...