cosmology

For three decades, researchers hunted in vain for new elementary particles that would have explained why nature looks the way it does. As physicists confront that failure, they’re reexamining a longstanding assumption: that big stuff consists of smaller stuff.

When astronomers tried to confirm a signal from the birth of the first stars after the Big Bang, they saw nothing.

Celia Escamilla-Rivera is combining large data sets with supercomputers to test general relativity against its little-known competitors.

In computer simulations of possible universes, researchers have discovered that a neural network can infer the amount of matter in a whole universe by studying just one of its galaxies.

A central pillar of cosmology — the universe is the same everywhere and in all directions — is surviving a storm of possible evidence against it.

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.

When Steven Weinberg died last month, the world lost one of its most profound thinkers.

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