A European-based space mission, led by the French space agency CNES, took off today on a six-year mission to search for extrasolar planets. The COROT probe (which apparently stands ... Read More

A little late due to the holidays, but here it is... Dec. 27, 1571 - Johannes Kepler, German mathematician and astronomer, is born. Kepler is best known for developing Kepler's ... Read More

Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are blasts of high-energy radiation emitted during certain cosmic phenomena. Scientists have generally classified them into two categories: Long GRBs - Thought to occur when massive stars ... Read More

Dec. 19, 1714 - American astronomer John Winthrop is born. Winthrop was one of the first American scientists to be taken seriously in Europe, and had close ties to ... Read More

One questions related to black holes is how they interact thermally with the rest of the universe. This concern with black hole thermodynamics was first posed in 1972 by ... Read More

Dec. 14, 1546 - Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, mentor to Johannes Kepler, is born. Dec. 14, 1900 - Max Planck presents the theoretical derivation of his solution to the ultraviolet catastrophe ... Read More

This holiday season, About Physics will provide some tips for picking out gifts for the scientifically-minded person on your Christmas list. Below are the books (and one DVD) that ... Read More

Black holes are one of the most popular and least understood concepts in physics. Learn more about them in our What is a Black Hole? article. Also, check ... Read More

According to this article in Science, astronomers have detected anions, negatively charged particles, in space. Neutral and positively charged particles have been detected for a while, but the detection ... Read More

Dec. 10, 1684 - Edmund Halley reads a paper entitled "De motu corporum in gyrum" ("On the motion of bodies in orbit") to the Royal Society. The paper was ... Read More