Orbital Path – space, stars, the universe and us

To make a black hole, you need to think big. Really big.
Start with a star much bigger than the sun — the bigger the better. Then settle in, and wait millions and millions and millions of years for your star to die.
That should do the trick, if you want to get yourself a garden-variety black hole. But there’s another kind of black hole. They are mind-boggling in size. And deeply mysterious:...

On September 15, 2018, the last Delta II rocket lifted off from Vandenberg Air Force base, in California. It carried into orbit IceSat-2 — a satellite equipped with perhaps the most sophisticated space laser ever built.
NASA didn’t put it up there to shoot down rogue asteroids. Instead, it’s taking aim — with exquisite precision — at Earth....

We live our lives in three dimensions. But we also walk those three dimensions along a fourth dimension: time.
Our world makes sense thanks to mathematics. Math lets us count our livestock, it lets us navigate our journeys. Mathematics has also proved an uncanny, stunningly accurate guide to what Brian Greene calls “the dark corners of reality.”...

To hear Leonard Susskind tell it, we are living in a golden age of
quantum physics.
And he should know.