space

Sean Carroll is a renowned theoretical physicist, host of the hit science podcast Mindscape, and the New York Times bestselling author of “Something Deeply Hidden.” His new book, “The Biggest Ideas in the Universe” is a deep dive into physics that pulls back the veil of mystery from most complex ideas in the field.

A neutron star forms when a massive star collapses to send supernova brilliance outward and a tiny remnant core imploding inward. That core — now a 12-mile-wide sun of its own — can spin hundreds of times a second, causing its magnetic field to wrap around itself, intensifying to a strength that be a thousand trillion times greater than Earth’s magnetic field. Such stars are now called magnetars.

An interview with Mickey Hart.

Here’s a twist on the expression “Blue Moon.” This coming Tuesday and Wednesday evenings at around 8 p.m., lower in the western sky, the nearest star to the crescent Moon will be the bluest of them all, which is Virgo’s brightest star, Spica. The lovely twilight of dusk will still be visible though fading, and the low waxing crescent Moon is always an ancient, evocative sight all by itself.

July’s first-ever James Webb Telescope images showed sharper-than-ever scenes of extremely distant objects – some distorted into lines and arcs by the warping of space created by invisibly distant massive objects. The goal is to ultimately see the earliest stars and galaxies being formed, once the universe became transparent 279,000 years after the Big Bang. But if the universe is eternal, the Big Bang could still have happened.

Every summer there’s a great meteor shower, the Perseids. Some years they are spectacular, other years you only see a tenth of what’s happening. We’ll hear how visible the shooting stars will be this year.

Interest in space -- our last great frontier -- has never been higher, and there’s one journalist who has had a front seat to interstellar exploration for…

Former President Clinton speechwriter Jeff Shesol's new book, "Mercury Rising: John Glenn, John Kennedy and the New Battleground of the Cold War" sheds…

How did life begin? Are we alone in the universe? How will it all end? In his new book, "Cosmic Queries: StarTalk’s Guide to Who We Are, How We Got Here,…

Acclaimed journalist David Brown's new book "The Mission" tells how one of America's boldest and potentially most revolutionary space missions came to…