See also stories tagged with Cosmology
In dark skies at night, distant starlight twinkles and speaks to vast cosmic histories almost as old as time itself. New data from instruments such as NASA's James Webb Space Telescope are helping astrophysicists probe deep ...
Physics is most readily applied to relatively simple systems: a pendulum, two electrons colliding or the structure of the solar system. But when systems become complicated—when many particles interact with one another, in ...
Doubts about the standard model of cosmology are deepening after a new study identified fundamental problems in a recent analysis that defended the conventional view that the universe is currently undergoing accelerated expansion ...
Astronomers can't see dark matter directly, but they know it's there: Its gravity shapes galaxies and the large-scale structure of the cosmos. In an effort to uncover the composition of this hidden mass, a team at Lawrence ...
The universe is known to be expanding at an accelerating rate. Physicists typically attribute this acceleration to dark energy, a mysterious component of the universe that exerts negative pressure, causing space to expand ...
At the center of most galaxies lies a supermassive black hole, with a mass millions to billions of times that of our sun and some of the most extreme gravity in the universe.
Welcome back to our series on interstellar travel! In our first installment, we examined attempts to realize nuclear propulsion and how the technology could be used to reach the nearest star. In our second, we examined how ...
For close to a century, physicists have pursued a way to unite gravity with quantum mechanics. Known as quantum gravity, this goal has remained frustratingly out of reach so far. Similarly elusive is the force of dark energy, ...
A mysterious background of extremely low-frequency gravitational waves detected by networks of pulsars may carry information about events that began more than 13 billion years ago—including the formation of some of the first ...
Theoretical physicists have long predicted the existence of millicharged particles (mCPs), hypothetical particles that carry a very small electric charge. These particles are expected to interact very weakly with ordinary ...
