Welcome to another installment in our ongoing series on physics concepts that we hear all the time and don’t actually understand. Today’s buzzword is “Dark Matter” – and no, not the TV adaptation of the sci-fi comic book. Or the completely unrelated movie. Or the also completely unrelated novel, or the TV show being adapted…

NASA’s Space Telescope Science Institute (STSci) lacks the rockstar name recognition of places like the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Cape Canaveral, or Kennedy Space Center, but that may be about to change. STSci is the mission operations center for the recently launched James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), and as it comes on line, its findings are…

At some point, you may have overheard your physics nerd friends (everyone has a couple of those, right?) talking about ‘red shift’ and wondered if it was some kind of code for their secret geopolitical leanings.  Luckily, there is no need to go all McCarthyist on them; red shift is a key concept in astronomy….