Universe Today Audio

In science fiction, wormholes are a method often used to travel great distances across space. Are these magic bridges really possible? With all my enthusiasm for humanity’s future in space, there’s one glaring problem. We’re soft meat bags of mostly water, and those other stars are really really far away. Even with the most optimistic […]

When humans finally blast off for another world, where will we be going? Will we return to the Moon, and take over where the Apollo astronauts left off, or will we press onto Mars, and set foot on a whole new planet? Humanity is going to need to make a difficult choice in the next […]

What does it take to have the “Right Stuff” to become an Astronaut? Are you an overachiever? Are you working on multiple PhDs in obscure and difficult topics? Can you speak multiple languages, including alienese? Do you suspect, if handed the controls, you could complete the Kessel Run in fewer parsecs than Han Solo? If […]

One of the interesting consequences of quantum theory is that particles can randomly appear in the cosmos, and if you wait long enough, conscious minds and maybe even whole new Universes. Welcome to the baffling concept of Boltzmann brains. We blow minds here on Guide to Space. All we want is for you to start […]

Doesn’t it feel like the Universe is perfectly tuned for life? Actually, it’s a horrible hostile place, delivering the bare minimum for human survival. Consider that incomprehensible series of events that brought you to this moment. In a way that we still don’t understand, a complex mix of chemicals came together in just the right […]

We know that the Sun will last another 5 billion years and then expand us a red giant. What will actually make this process happen? One of the handy things about the Universe, apart from the fact that it exists, is that it lets us see crazy different configurations of everything, including planets, stars and […]

In the list of crazy hypothetical ideas, terraforming the Sun has to be one of the top 10. So just how would someone go about doing terraforming our sun, a star, if they wanted to try? In our series on terraforming other worlds. We’ve covered Mars, Venus, the Moon and Jupiter. Even though I solved […]

Rogue stars are moving so quickly they’re leaving the Milky Way, and never coming back. How in the Universe could this happen? Stars are built with the lightest elements in the Universe, hydrogen and helium, but they contain an incomprehensible amount of mass. Our Sun is made of 2 x 10^30 kgs of stuff. That’s […]

We talk about stellar mass and supermassive black holes. What are the limits? How massive can these things get? Without the light pressure from nuclear fusion to hold back the mass of the star, the outer layers compress inward in an instant. The star dies, exploding violently as a supernova. All that’s left behind is […]

The strangest feature on Iapetus is the equatorial ridge. What could possibly create a feature like this? To paraphrase the British geneticist J.B.S Haldane, “in my suspicion, the Universe is not only stranger than we suppose, it’s stranger than we can suppose.” The context was life and evolution, but he might as well been talking […]

For millennia, human beings have stared up at the night sky and stood in awe of the Milky Way. Today, stargazers and amateur astronomers continue in this tradition, knowing that what they are witnessing is in fact a collection of hundreds of millions of stars and dust clouds, not to mention billions of other worlds. […]

Dr. Mike Brown is a professor of planetary astronomy at Caltech. He’s best known as the man who killed Pluto, thanks to his team’s discovery of Eris and other Kuiper Belt Objects. We asked him to help us explain this unusual region of our solar system. Soon after Pluto was discovered by Clyde Tombaugh on […]

The Earth’s atmosphere is a total drag, especially if you’re trying to orbit our planet. So how low can you go? The Earth’s atmosphere is a total drag, especially if you’re trying to orbit our planet. It’s a drag. Get it? Atmospheric drag. Drag. Drag. Hi, my name is Fraser Cain. I’m the publisher of […]

It is possible that humanity might one day live on Mars, but it would be quite the challenge. So what would it take to turn the Red Planet into a second home?

The Solar System is 4.5 billion years old, but the Universe is much older. What was here before our Solar System formed? The Solar System is old. Like, dial-up-fax-machine-old. 4.6 billion years to be specific. The Solar System has nothing on the Universe. It’s been around for 13.8 billion years, give or take a few […]