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Cosmology
In all of science, no figures have changed the world more than Einstein and Newton. Will anyone ever be as revolutionary again?
The Standard Model of elementary particles has three nearly identical copies of particles: generations. And nobody knows why.
There is nothing more important to science than its ability to prove ideas wrong.
The observable Universe is 92 billion light-years in diameter. These pictures put just how large that is in perspective.
Over time, the Universe becomes less dominated by dark matter and more dominated by dark energy. Is one transforming into the other?
"The pulsar sort of consumes the thing that recycled it, just as the spider eats its mate.”
13.8 billion years ago, the hot Big Bang gave rise to the Universe we know. Here's why the reverse, a Big Crunch, isn't how it will end.
In all of human history, only 5 spacecraft have had the right trajectory to exit the Solar System. Will they ever catch Voyager 1?
Everything is made of matter, not antimatter, including black holes. If antimatter black holes existed, what would they do?
In Sun-like stars, hydrogen gets fused into helium. In the Big Bang, hydrogen fusion also makes helium. But they aren't close to the same.
The Standard Model may or may not be in trouble, but particle physics definitely needs saving. Here's what the new LHC can do.
For a thousand light-years in all directions, there's a "bubble" that the Sun sits at the center of. Here's the story behind it.
Look out at a distant object, and you're not seeing it as it is today. It's size, brightness, and actual distance are all different.
Singularities frustrate our understanding. But behind every singularity in physics hides a secret door to a new understanding of the world.
We take for granted that time is real. But what if it's only an illusion, and a relative illusion at that? Does time even exist?
Ancient helium-3 from the dawn of time leaks from the Earth, offering clues to our planet’s formation. A key question is where it leaks from.
As far as we can tell, there's no limit to how far it goes on; only a limit to how far we can see. Could the Universe truly be infinite?
We've fooled ourselves before with galaxies that look just like this one. The evidence we have simply isn't strong enough.
In the latest edition of the Starts With A Bang podcast, we talk with soon-to-be Dr. Arianna Long about galaxies, from birth to today.
Our Universe requires dark matter in order to make sense of things, astrophysically. Could massive photons do the trick?
The story of how Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune were made isn't a universal one. Some gas giants were built different.
To study the origin of the Universe, we could build a constellation of six expensive spacecraft — or we could just use the Moon.
For some reason, when we talk about the age of stars, galaxies, and the Universe, we use "years" to measure time. Can we do better?
Galactic archaeology has uncovered a spectacular find: the Milky Way already existed more than 13 billion years ago.
The James Webb Space Telescope could help scientists learn about the cosmic dark ages and how they ended.
Empty, intergalactic space is just 2.725 K: not even three degrees above absolute zero. But the Boomerang Nebula is even colder.
The far infrared reveals both the coldest and hottest gas in the Universe, and can teach us what no other wavelength range can.
Is there any good reason for assigning North and South the way we do, or could we have just as easily done the reverse?