A few years back, Google made waves when it claimed that some of its hardware had achieved quantum supremacy, performing operations that would be effectively impossible to simulate on a classical ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. If you’ve been making the same commute for a long time, you’ve probably settled on what seems like the best route. But “best” is a ...

The supernova was the death of a red supergiant star 500 times larger than the sun, in a galaxy just 22 million light-years away. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate ...

I love simple questions that wind up having complicated—or at least not straightforward—answers. Astronomers twist themselves into knots, for example, trying to define what a planet is, even though it ...