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How the simple act of watching twilight can radically transform our perception of the world and our role within it.

The first elements in the Universe formed just minutes after the Big Bang, but it took hundreds of thousands of years before atoms formed.

Astronomers propose a new location for the mysterious force that accelerates the universe.

Peaking on the night of August 11/12, up to 100 bright meteors per hour will be visible. Here’s how to make the most of it.

In the early stages of the hot Big Bang, matter and antimatter were (almost) balanced. After a brief while, matter won out. Here’s how.

With LEDs bringing brighter nighttime lighting than ever before, and thousands of new satellites polluting the skies, astronomy needs help.

A few years ago, the first dark matter-free galaxies were announced, and then immediately disputed. Now, there are too many to ignore.

There’s an extra source of massive “stuff” in our Universe beyond what gravitation and normal matter can explain. Could light be the answer?

50 years ago, Stephen Hawking showed that black holes emit radiation and eventually decay away. That fate may now apply to everything.

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.

If the multiverse is real, where does all the energy for it come from? One of the biggest scientific puzzles, even given our knowledge of the Big Bang, is to understand […]

Is it groupthink? Or is there a deeper reason? In the early half of the 20th century, even after the discovery of the expanding Universe, physicists considered a wide variety of […]

Thanks to observations of gravitational waves, scientists were able to settle a longstanding debate over the speed of gravity.

Developing an awareness of and an appreciation for science is what we all truly need, not what we’ve been doing.

During the industrial era the cost of artificial light fell off a cliff — and the road to illumination was paved with ingenuity and slaughter.

Everything is being driven apart. But there’s hope of reaching what’s currently so far away. For the first 7.8 billion years, the Universe unfolded exactly as scientists would have expected in […]

The majority of the matter in our Universe isn’t made of any of the particles in the Standard Model. Could the axion save the day?

The first stars in the Universe were made of pristine material: hydrogen and helium alone. Once they die, nothing escapes their pollution.

We have two ways of measuring the expansion rate. Here’s the harder one. If you want to understand where our Universe came from and where it’s going, you need to measure […]

A deep dive into the chaotic journey of star formation.

Every time our Universe cools below a critical threshold, we fall out of equilibrium. That’s the best thing that ever happened to us.

Do grim sci-fi scenarios crush our hopes for real-world growth? Author Michael Harris looks elsewhere to unblock the road to a better future.

The Big Bang’s hot glow faded away after only a few million years, leaving the Universe dark until the first stars formed. Oh, the changes!

The laws of physics state that you can’t create or destroy matter without also creating or destroying an equal amount of antimatter. So how are we here?

Particle physics needs a new collider to supersede the Large Hadron Collider. Muons, not electrons or protons, might hold the key.

Why “audio gaps” in video meetings wear us out — and why we need the meaningful relationships forged in communal workspaces.

Here’s why the answer may forever elude scientists.

The inevitable long, slow decline is accelerating, and there’s nothing we can do. The Universe, as it is today, is less active, is forming fewer stars, and is creating fewer chances […]

Time always moves in the same direction, but what if the Universe were contracting? As we step forward in time, a number of things always seem to happen together. Objects […]

Symmetries aren’t just about folding or rotating a piece of paper, but have a profound array of applications when it comes to physics.