Walk outside on a clear night, look up, and remind yourself of this unsettling fact: almost everything you can see is the cosmic equivalent of a rounding error. Stars, planets, glowing gas, galaxies, you and me – all of it together makes up only a tiny sliver of the universe’s true contents. The rest ...
Why does the universe look so orderly when, underneath, it seems governed by chaos and mystery? Astronomers can map distant galaxies and weigh black holes, yet some of the biggest questions about reality itself remain maddeningly open. Over the last few decades, powerful telescopes, gravitational-wave detectors, and particle colliders have turned cosmology into a ...
Imagine reaching out your hand and brushing the edge of a black hole, the most extreme object in the universe. It sounds like pure science fiction, but astrophysicists have actually mapped out, in unnerving detail, what would really happen to a human body that got too close. Far from being an instant, painless fade ...
