Zoom image will be displayedWe normally conceive of our Universe as having emerged from a preceding period of cosmic inflation, with our Big Bang occurring where one region of inflating space ceased inflating and transitioned to being dominated by matter...
Zoom image will be displayedFrom anywhere in the Universe, any object that’s in free-fall will have its trajectory determined by the force of gravity: defined by Einstein as the curvature of space. If there were some form of negative mass...
Zoom image will be displayedToday, the Universe has evolved into the complex, life-friendly place we know it to be because we were able to form neutral atoms early on in the Universe. Yet without just the right quantum properties and...
When a gravitational wave passes through a location in space, it causes an expansion and a compression at alternate times in alternate directions, causing laser arm-lengths to change in mutually perpendicular orientations. Exploiting this physical change is how we developed...
Whether two particles collide inside an accelerator or in the depths of space is irrelevant; all that matters is that we can detect the debris of what comes out, including newly created “daughter” particles. Although the flux of high-energy particles...
In theory, every quanta within each quantum field theory has a spectrum of excitations it can occupy, and those excitations occur within that quantum field theory, impacting the zero-point energy of empty space. Given the particles and fields we know...
Earth, as well as all planets and moons with rocky surfaces, has experienced a large number of collisions from objects of extraterrestrial origin. Any impact that’s massive and energetic enough, in principle as well as in practice, could cause a...
This illustration shows toponium, made of a top-antitop pair of quarks, bound together into a meson rather than the (more typical) situation where they decay away before forming a bound state. Toponium wasn’t initially expected, but observations from the CMS...
This image, taken with a small telescope on the night of July 1, 2025, shows what was then known as the candidate interstellar object A11pI3Z, which has since been renamed 3I/ATLAS due to its confirmed interstellar nature. The smears are...
Mercury, Venus, and likely Earth will all be devoured.During the main phase of a star’s life, planets can orbit at nearly any distance from it, including very close in. As the star evolves, it becomes a subgiant and eventually a...
