cosmology

Scientists just announced that they’ve detected what might be some of the earliest galaxies to form in the universe, a tantalizing discovery made thanks to NASA’s new flagship James Webb…

“There are some configurations of the future that don’t correspond to anything in the past,” Cotler said. “There’s nothing in the past that would evolve into them.”Giddings has proposed a…

BALTIMORE — The James Webb Space Telescope is living up to its promise as a wayback machine. The spectacularly sensitive observatory is finding and confirming galaxies more…

In 2016, astronomers led by Pieter van Dokkum of Yale University published a bombshell paper claiming the discovery of a galaxy so dim, yet so broad and heavy, that it must be almost…

On the morning of October 9, astronomers’ inboxes pinged with a relatively modest alert: NASA’s Swift Observatory had just detected a fresh burst of energy, assumed to be coming from…

Most of the quantum fields that fill our universe have one, and only one, preferred state, in which they’ll remain for eternity. Most, but not all.True and False VacuumsIn the 1970s,…

There are probably 200 billion stars in the Milky Way, stretched across space in a disk shaped like a ninja’s throwing star. It’s so big that, traveling at the speed of light, it’d still…

In March 2018, researchers launched what looks like a white, cooler-sized fridge to the International Space Station. That heavy box houses a $100 million facility known as the Cold Atom…

When hydrogen atoms first formed, they absorbed and then emitted ambient 21-centimeter radiation at equal rates, which made the clouds of hydrogen that filled the primordial universe…

A group of scientists may have stumbled upon a radical new way to do cosmology.Cosmologists usually determine the composition of the universe by observing as much of it as possible. But…