Thomas Lewton

The zoo of spontaneously emerging particlelike entities known as quasiparticles has grown quickly and become more and more exotic. Here are a few of the most curious and potentially useful examples.

One black hole is nice, but astrophysicists can do a lot more science with 50 of them.

Three-dimensional supernova simulations have solved the mystery of why they explode at all.

The newly-measured rate of a key nuclear fusion process from the Big Bang matches the picture of the universe 380,000 years later.

Subtle aberrations in the clockwork blinking of stars could become “the result of the century.” That’s if the distortions are produced by a network of giant filaments left over from the birth of the universe.

Claudia de Rham showed how theories of “massive gravity” could potentially get rid of the need for dark energy.

New calculations show how hypothetical particles called gravitons would give rise to a special kind of noise.

Physicists have proposed extra cosmic ingredients that could explain the faster-than-expected expansion of space.

As the founding director of a new institute for fundamental research in Rwanda, the physicist Omololu Akin-Ojo hopes to stem the brain drain of Africa’s brightest minds.