Cosmology

Cosmology

NGC 5584 cepheid hubble
How fast is the Universe expanding? Two major methods disagree. New JWST data, just released, strengthens this Hubble tension even further.
Raisin bread expanding Universe
Two fundamentally different ways of measuring the expanding Universe disagree. What's the root cause of this Hubble tension?
atom quantum
The visible Universe extends 46.1 billion light-years from us, while we've probed scales down to as small as ~10^-19 meters.
el gordo JWST rotated cropped
From when its light was emitted, the El Gordo galaxy cluster might be the most massive object in all of existence. Here's how JWST sees it.
albert einstein j robert oppenheimer 1947
Even with the quantum rules governing the Universe, there are limits to what matter can withstand. Beyond that, black holes are unavoidable.
dark matter
Back in the 1930s, Fritz Zwicky postulated the existence of dark matter. No one took it seriously until Vera Rubin's work: 40 years later.
ideal night sy conditions
All stars, eventually, run out of fuel and die. Given all the stars we can see and the vast distance to them, are any of them already dead?
An image of a blue object in a blue box depicting axions.
The hunt for the elusive particles continues.
The little book about aliens on the moon.
We may be the last generation born not knowing if we are alone in the Universe.
The world set free by Rachel Wells, inspired by Oppenheimer.
Science fiction met nuclear fission when Hungarian physicist Leó Szilárd pondered the explosive potential of nuclear energy.
JADES galaxies
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?
string theory e(8)
If you've found yourself befuddled by extraordinary scientific-sounding claims, you're not alone. But this centuries-old lesson can help.
flight through universe CEERS JWST NASA
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.
distant quasar
Headlines have blared that quasar ticking confirms that time passed more slowly in the early Universe. That's not how any of this works.
overview effect
There's an entire Universe out there. So, with all that space, all those planets, and all those chances at life, why do we all live here?
big bang mirage
A cute mathematical trick can "rescale" the Universe so that it isn't actually expanding. But can that "trick" survive all our cosmic tests?
blue marble not 24 hours apollo 17
As the Earth spins and wobbles on its axis and revolves elliptically around the Sun, each day changes from the last. "24 hours" isn't right.
a drawing of a spiral with a space in the background.
The multiverse pushes beyond the limits of the scientific method. From our vantage point in the Universe, we cannot know if it's real.
a close up of two stars in the sky.
In many ways, we are still novices playing with toy models seeking to understand the stars. 
cold fuzzy dark matter simulations
In a far-reaching discovery with astrophysicist Karolina Garcia, we discuss what's in the Universe and how it grew up.
proton internal structure
If we waited long enough, would even protons themselves decay? The far future stability of the Universe depends on it.
zelda depths reionization
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.
a computer generated image of a speaker and a box.
How are we to deal with the quantization of spacetime and gravity?
periodic table
Up until 2002, we thought that the heaviest stable element was bismuth: #83 on the periodic table. That's absolutely no longer the case.
globular cluster terzan 5
Sun-like stars live for around 10 billion years, but our Universe is only 13.8 billion years old. So what's the maximum lifetime for a star?
a blue circle surrounded by red lines on a white background.
Neuroscientist and author Bobby Azarian explores the idea that the Universe is a self-organizing system that evolves and learns.
NGC 1277 red and dead
With hundreds of billions of stars burning bright, some galaxies are already dead. Their inhabitants might not know it, but we're certain.
warm-hot intergalactic medium sculptor wall
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.
a computer generated image of a wave
There is no such thing as a void in the Universe.
hubble tension
When Einstein gave General Relativity to the world, he included an extraneous cosmological constant. How did his 'biggest blunder' occur?