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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
On paper, our universe should have torn itself apart, collapsed in on itself, or never formed complex structures at all. Yet here we are, orbiting a star in a galaxy stitched together by forces that, in many cases, we still don’t fully understand. From cosmic glue that seems too weak to do the job, ...
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 ...
Ever wonder what’s really happening behind the scenes of our universe? The cosmos has been keeping secrets from us for billions of years. Only now, through the power of modern physics, are you starting to see beneath the cosmic curtain. You’re living in a golden age of discovery. Scientists are peeling back layers of reality ...
Far beyond the glow of city lights, the universe is staging dramas so extreme that our best telescopes can barely keep up. Astronomers are catching flashes, shadows, and subtle ripples in spacetime that hint at unseen forces and unknown physics, yet each new discovery seems to raise more questions than it answers. From galaxies ...
