Astrophysics for People in a Hurry

between and among all known particles. So the choices are clear. Either dark matter particles mu ...

6. Dark Energy As if you didn’t have enough to worry about, the universe in recent decades was discovered to ...

you can call it GR after you get to know it better. Published in 1916, GR outlines the relevant mathematica ...

Yet, in the case of Einstein’s relativity, the founding principles of the entire theory require that everythin ...

At the end of the day, general relativity described two kinds of gravity. One is the familiar kind, like t ...

The supernovas used in Perlmutter’s and Schmidt’s studies are worth their weight in fusionable nucle ...

energy in the universe; dark matter comprises 27 percent, with regular matter comprising a mere ...

At the end of the tallies, visible matter alone could account for no more than 5 percent of the critical de ...

cosmos. Without a doubt, Einstein’s greatest blunder was having declared that lambda was his greatest blunder. ...

cosmos—and will thus be denied access to key pages from the cosmic drama that is our universe. Behold my r ...

7. The Cosmos on the Table Trivial questions sometimes require deep and expansive knowledge of the co ...

and the other promotes violent combustion, yet the two combined make liquid water, which ...

As noted earlier, the name helium was duly derived from Helios, the Greek sun god. And with 92 perc ...

bad because their contamination can be easily subtracted from telescope data. In a model of cooperation, t ...

any element. This means something quite simple: if you split iron atoms via fission, they wil ...

fans. Iridium is also the world’s most famous smoking gun. A thin layer of it can be found worldwide ...

number of elements in the Periodic Table. The metal mercury, liquid and runny at room temperature, ...

as a planet, and the revelation of a heretofore undocumented reservoir of small icy bodies called the Kuiper ...

8. On Being Round Apart from crystals and broken rocks, not much else in the cosmos naturally comes with ...

harden before hitting the bottom. On orbiting space stations, where everything is weightless, you gently squirt o ...