Big Bang

Big Freeze, Big Rip, Big Crunch, Bounce or vacuum decay? Steven Strogatz speaks with theoretical cosmologist Katie Mack about the five ways that scientists think the universe could come to an end.

Two new studies suggest that certain tetrahedral arrangements of galaxies outnumber their mirror images, potentially reflecting details of the universe’s birth. But confirmation is needed.

Quantum field theory may be the most successful scientific theory of all time, but there’s reason to think it’s missing something. Steven Strogatz speaks with theoretical physicist David Tong about this enigmatic theory.

The James Webb Space Telescope has the potential to rewrite the history of the cosmos and reshape humanity’s position within it. But first, a lot of things have to work just right.

Physicists are translating commonsense principles into strict mathematical constraints on how our universe must have behaved at the beginning of time.

Since they can’t prod actual universes as they inflate and bump into each other in the hypothetical multiverse, physicists are studying digital and physical analogs of the process.

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.

It was an old idea of Stephen Hawking’s: Unseen “primordial” black holes might be the hidden dark matter. A new series of studies has shown how the theory can work.