The oldest light in the universe has been washing over Earth for nearly as long as time itself, yet for most of human history we had no idea it was there. Today, astronomers treat that faint glow as a kind of forensic record, a message written in radiation instead of ink. It is helping ...
For more than a century, cosmology has told a relatively clean story: the universe began in a searing hot Big Bang, space expanded, matter cooled, and the rest is history written in stars and galaxies. But a new generation of quantum theories is quietly tearing at the edges of that tidy narrative, suggesting the ...
The universe has an origin story that most of us learn in a single phrase: the Big Bang. But in the last two decades, that once-daring idea has started to look almost conservative compared with what cosmologists are now proposing. From bouncing universes to cosmic inflation fields and simulated realities, new theories are chipping ...
You’ve probably heard of dark matter. It’s that mysterious, invisible substance that makes up about eighty percent of all the matter in the universe. What if I told you that some scientists now think it might have existed before the Big Bang itself? Let’s be real, that’s a mind-bending idea. A groundbreaking theory suggests that ...
The universe’s most ancient stars have held their secrets for over 13 billion years, but recent research is forcing astronomers to completely rethink what those earliest celestial beacons were actually like. For decades, scientists believed these primordial giants were uniformly massive monsters that burned bright and died young. Now, cutting-edge computer simulations and unexpected molecular ...
