Every night sky looks calm, but it’s anything but. The universe is stretching, gently and relentlessly, turning yesterday’s constellations into a wider, thinner tapestry. Scientists have chased this mystery across a century, building clever tools to measure a cosmos that refuses to sit still. The surprise isn’t just that space expands; it’s that the more ...
They start as quiet monsters, swallowing light and time, and end as the most honest questions in physics. For decades, black holes were places where our equations went to hide; now they’re where we go looking for answers. New observations of early, oversized black holes and crisp gravitational-wave signals have forced scientists to rethink what ...
We grow up thinking of gravity as the simplest force in the universe: things fall down, planets go around the sun, end of story. Yet when you follow the evidence from black holes to the edges of the observable cosmos, that everyday picture falls apart in ways that are almost unsettling. Gravity, it turns out, ...
The idea that the universe might run on a kind of underlying code sounds like philosophy or science fiction, but right now a surprising number of hard-headed physicists and mathematicians are treating it as a concrete research question. From the way galaxies cluster to the way subatomic particles interact, patterns keep showing up that feel ...
Every so often, physics delivers a result so strange it feels less like science and more like a dare: accept this, or admit your intuition is useless out there. From black holes that evaporate, to particles that are and are not in a place until we look, reality keeps shrugging at what seems “reasonable” to ...
For more than two decades, dark energy has played the role of invisible puppet master, driving the universe to expand faster and faster, seemingly without limit. Now a new set of tantalizing results hints that this mysterious force might not be constant after all – it may actually be weakening over time. If that holds ...
Imagine building an entire worldview on rules that turn out to be local house customs rather than universal laws. That is the unsettling possibility now creeping into serious cosmology and fundamental physics: the idea that the deep constants we treat as absolute might shift from place to place in the cosmos. This is not ...
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 ...
For more than a century, astronomers have been measuring how quickly the universe is flying apart, quietly assuming that with better telescopes and cleaner data, all the numbers would eventually agree. Instead, the opposite is happening. New observations, from ultra-precise space telescopes to clever uses of exploding stars and gravitational waves, are sharpening a ...
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 ...
