Physics

A surprisingly youthful estimate of the age of the rings has stirred a backlash.

Calculations involving a higher dimension are guiding physicists toward a misstep in Stephen Hawking’s legendary black hole analysis.

Three physicists stumbled across an unexpected relationship between some of the most ubiquitous objects in math.

How a young celebrity became one of the first female astronomers at Caltech, befriended Richard Feynman, and ended up the world’s foremost chronicler of the science of the night sky.

Most every cosmologist believes the universe is flat. A new analysis argues that it’s closed.

A close look at fundamental symmetries has exposed hidden patterns in the universe. Physicists think that those same symmetries may also reveal time’s original secret.

How do magnetars get so magnetic? A study of stellar explosions shows that the long-accepted theory might be wrong.

The KATRIN experiment is closing in on the mass of the neutrino, which could point to new laws of particle physics and shape theories of cosmology.

Playing with a simple bean machine illustrates how deterministic laws can produce probabilistic, random-seeming behavior.