In science, there are thousands of ways to measure the world around us that the average person may never encounter. For example: Pascals to measure pressure, Candles to measure light intensity, and ...

It's fun to think about how we know stuff. For instance, the sun has a mass of about 2 x 10 30 kilograms. That is such an enormous mass that it's difficult to comprehend. And if it's so difficult for ...

Astronomers cannot directly weigh celestial objects like galaxies; indirect methods are necessary. Mass determination leverages the relationship between gravity and mass, utilizing orbital periods and ...

In a recent piece for my column The Universe, I wrote about the biggest black holes in the cosmos. Black holes are rather ...

This is a good question, and also a good reminder to be careful with one’s language when writing about physics! Most of the time, if you’re reading an article, what we mean by mass and rest mass is ...

The mass of an object is how heavy it is. The amount of matter in an object is its mass. You can use the words 'heavy' and 'light' to describe the mass of an object. You can use the words 'heavier' ...

It is tempting to think that some materials are always heavier than other materials. For example, someone might say that metal is heavier than air. But it depends on how much of each material there is ...

In my previous post about a floating Saturn, I hinted that I could write about the methods we can use to find the density of Saturn. Oh, and once again, the density of Saturn is lower than the density ...

The breakthrough measurement of the white dwarf LAWD 37 made with Hubble gives us a hint of how the sun will look at the end of its life. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an ...

A new study has attempted to pin down the properties of interstellar comet 3I/Atlas, finding it is "anomalously massive" at ...

How do rogue planetary-mass objects -- celestial bodies with masses between stars and planets -- form? An international team of astronomers has used advanced simulations to show that these enigmatic ...