Walk outside on a clear night, look up, and you’re staring at a contradiction that keeps some of the world’s best physicists awake at 3 a.m. For more than a century, cosmologists have believed they understood how fast the universe is growing, only to find in the past decade that their answers simply do ...
What if the universe isn’t a cold, indifferent void, but something more like a vast, slowly breathing creature? It sounds like science fiction, yet a growing number of physicists, cosmologists, and philosophers are taking versions of this idea seriously enough to write papers, build models, and argue at conferences about it. For them, the ...
Somewhere beyond the edge of what our telescopes can see, there may be another universe that looks eerily like our own – same laws of physics, same cosmic ingredients, but running on a kind of mirror-time. In the last few years, a series of bold ideas in cosmology has revived an astonishing possibility: that ...
Somewhere in the dark between the stars, entire suns are vanishing without a trace, slipping past a boundary from which not even light can return. Black holes sit at the center of this mystery, warping space and time so violently that our best physics starts to crack. Astronomers can now photograph the shadows of ...
On the largest scales we can see, the universe is doing something deeply counterintuitive: instead of slowing down under the pull of gravity, galaxies are racing away from each other faster and faster. For more than two decades, this runaway expansion has been blamed on a vague, unsettling concept called dark energy, a kind ...
In the faintest reaches of the sky, where even large telescopes once saw only darkness, astronomers are now finding sprawling cities of ancient stars that should not, by any reasonable model, exist so early in cosmic history. These are the universe’s oldest known galaxies, blazing into view from a time when the cosmos was ...
Not so long ago, astronomers expected the universe to behave like a ball thrown into the air: expand rapidly at first, then slow down under the pull of gravity. Instead, in one of the most unsettling discoveries of modern science, they found the opposite. The cosmic expansion is speeding up, as if some invisible ...
Every galaxy you see in those jaw-dropping Hubble images is held together by something invisible, something that silently outweighs all the stars, planets, gas, and dust we know. Physicists call it dark matter, and for decades they’ve treated it like a cold, dead scaffolding for the universe. But a growing group of thinkers is ...
For decades, astronomers thought the earliest stars were little more than distant pinpricks, silent witnesses to a universe still finding its shape. Now, those same ancient suns are turning into loud storytellers, upending long-held theories about how galaxies, black holes, and even the elements in our blood first formed. Using a new generation of ...
They lurk in the dark, bend time itself, and swallow light so completely that even our best telescopes see only their shadows, yet black holes have never been more visible in our imagination than they are now. In the past few years, astronomers have captured images of their silhouettes, weighed some that defy current ...
