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Big Bang Theory
Everything we observe beyond our Local Group is speeding away from us, omnidirectionally. If the Universe is expanding, where is the center?
If you said "with the Big Bang," congratulations: that was our best answer as of ~1979. Here's what we've learned in all the time since.
Einstein's theory of general relativity introduced the concept of space having a shape. So, what is the shape of space?
Back during the hot Big Bang, it wasn't just charged particles and photons that were created, but also neutrinos. Where are they now?
Although we still don't know the question, we know that the answer to life, the Universe, and everything is 42. Here are 5 possibilities.
From the Big Bang to black holes, singularities are hard to avoid. The math definitely predicts them, but are they truly, physically real?
Measurements of the acceleration of the universe don’t agree, stumping physicists working to understand the cosmic past and future. A new proposal seeks to better align these estimates — and is likely testable.
The question of why the Universe is the way it is is an ancient one, and none of the answers we have come up with are satisfying.
The laws of physics don't prefer matter over antimatter. So how can we be certain that distant stars & galaxies aren't made of antimatter?
6mins
If Einstein couldn’t solve the theory of everything, could anyone? Physicist Michio Kaku explains what it would take.
The hot Big Bang was an energetic, brilliantly luminous event. Today's Universe is alight with stars. But in between, the dark ages ruled.
A spherical structure nearly one billion light-years wide has been spotted in the nearby Universe, dating all the way back to the Big Bang.
With ~400 billion stars in the Milky Way and 6-20 trillion galaxies overall, that makes for a lot of stars. But not as many as you'd think.
Two fundamentally different ways of measuring the expanding Universe disagree. What's the root cause of this Hubble tension?
Today, our observable Universe extends for 46 billion light-years in all directions. But early on in our history, things were much smaller.
For many years, cosmologists have claimed the Universe is 13.8 billion years old. A new paper says no, it's 26.7 billion. How do we decide?
What are supermassive black holes, how common are they, and how do they grow up throughout cosmic history? Listen and find out!
From the present day all the way to less than 400 million years after the Big Bang, we're seeing how the Universe grew up like never before.
The multiverse pushes beyond the limits of the scientific method. From our vantage point in the Universe, we cannot know if it's real.
In many ways, we are still novices playing with toy models seeking to understand the stars.
In a far-reaching discovery with astrophysicist Karolina Garcia, we discuss what's in the Universe and how it grew up.
What do the dark recesses of the early Universe and Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom have in common? More than you could have ever hoped for.
How are we to deal with the quantization of spacetime and gravity?
Just by observing the tiny amount of deuterium left over from the Big Bang, we can determine that dark matter and dark energy must exist.
Hubble showed us what our modern day Universe looks like. JWST's big goal was to teach us how the Universe grew up. Here's where we are now.
There are two methods to measure the expansion rate of the Universe. The results do not agree with each other, and this is a big problem.
It's been 100 years since we discovered that the Universe was expanding. But if it's expanding, then what is it expanding into?
If our Universe were born a little differently, there wouldn't have been any planets, stars, galaxies, or chemically interesting reactions.
Perhaps the whole Universe is the result of a vacuum fluctuation, originating from what we could call quantum nothingness.
When the Universe was first born, the ingredients necessary for life were nowhere to be found. Only our "lucky stars" enabled our existence.