In the last yen years, astronomers have discovered scads of strange exploding stars, one-offs that may point to new and unusual physics. Supernova (SN) 2005E, discovered five years ago by the…

Richard Dawkins suggested that the first measure of an intelligent species, should two chance to meet, would be whether they understood how they came to be. I imagine such a remarkable exchange of…

I will discuss Leibniz's ideas on complexity (Discours de metaphysique, 1686), leading to modern work on program-size complexity, the halting probability and incompleteness. Leibniz's principle of…

Researches at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics have carried out the first fully three-dimensional computer simulations of a core collapse supernova over a timescale of hours after the…

Given I'm a mad scientist building a satellite in my basement, who are my heroes?  Are they Carl Sagan, astronomer populist extraordinaire?  Neil Tyson, a dynamic yet media-saavy heir to…

A Texas A&M University-led team of astronomers has uncovered what may be the earliest, most distant cluster of galaxies ever detected. The group of roughly 60 galaxies, called CLG J02182-05102,…

New images from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA's XMM-Newton, have helped astronomers detect a vast reservoir of intergalactic gas about 400 million light years from Earth. This discovery is…

ESA's Herschel infrared space telescope has located a hole in the side of a cloud of bright reflective gas known to astronomers as NGC 1999. The hole has provided scientists with a surprising glimpse…

Astronomers from the University of Florida will take a second look this summer at a rare cosmic cradle for the universe's largest stars, the constellation Carina. The massive gas cloud is located 8,…

The ESA's Herschel infrared space observatory is capturing new images from thousands of distant galaxies as they furiously build stars and beautiful star-forming clouds. The photographic evidence…