Astronomers have spent the past century (roughly) trying to figure out where all the elements on the Periodic Table come from. For example, the oldest hydrogen emerged when the universe was just a baby (Big Bang nucleosynthesis). And the...

To understand where we came from—how earth, the solar system, the galaxy became what they are today—we need to understand the beginning of time. For example, how did the first galaxies pull themselves together from the dark...

The primary characteristic that defines black holes is in the name. Black holes are black. The gravitational pull at the event horizon is so powerful that not even light can escape. In this case, black means absence of light. We also...

Here’s the story we like to tell about the beginning of the universe. Space is expanding evenly everywhere, but if you rewind that expansion you find that all of space was once compacted in an infinitesimal point of infinite density—the...

We know that the universe is getting bigger. And we know that the speed that the universe is getting bigger is also getting bigger. The standard assumption is that the acceleration rate is itself constant, which will surely result in...

Neutron stars aren't dark matter--we figured that out a while ago. But new research is telling us that they may be dark matter factories. They may produce the exotic axion, one of the most popular dark matter candidates.

Is there a limit to how much energy you can cram into, or pull out of one patch of space? Well, we thought so, but the James Webb Space Telescope has found a quasar that simultaneously breaks a century-old theoretical limit and may...

How did the universe begin? How can something come from nothing? One way to “solve” this most difficult of philosophical conundrums is to avoid it altogether. Maybe the universe didn’t begin. Maybe the Big Bang was just one in an endless...

At CERN, physicists are searching for answers to some of the biggest questions ever — like how the universe started and where everything comes from. To get one step closer to an answer, CERN scientists recreated the first moment after...

Where did life come from? It’s one of the biggest questions humans have ever asked — and the answer might be locked in ancient space rocks that were around before life began. To find out, NASA pulled off one of its most ambitious...

Astronomers have two main ways to calculate how fast the universe is expanding. Unfortunately, they don't agree with one another. The JWST was supposed to help solve this discrepancy, known as "The Hubble Tension" or "The Crisis in...

Ever wanted to explore the Cosmic Background Radiation? It's our best picture of the big bang, and now you can!

Science, Religion, and the Big Bang

In 2023, a team of researchers proposed that our universe experienced not one, but TWO Big Bangs about a month apart from one another. The first for the stuff described by our Standard Model of Particle Physics. And the second for that...

The James Webb Space Telescope is the most ambitious space observatory ever launched, and nobody hyped it more than us. So is it putting in work? Oh, boy, yes. Yes it is.

If you could survive a trip to the very first moments of reality as we know it, what color would you see?

While there's still a lot that astrophysicists don't know about the Big Bang, there are some things we do know. So today, let's get caught up on the Big Bang basics.

If a photon leaves the train station shortly after the Big Bang ...

Physicists have been struggling for some time to figure out why our universe is so comfy. Why, for example, are the fundamental constants - like the mass of the electron or the strength of the forces - just right for the emergence of...

Imagine you’re leading a game of 20 questions and you forget the thing you chose half way through. You have to keep answering yesses and nos and hope that you think of something that’s consistent with all your previous questions before...

Ever wish you could travel backward in time and do things differently? Good news: the laws of physics seem to say traveling backward in time is the same as traveling forwards. So why do we seem to be stuck in this inexorable flow towards...

The universe is precisely 13.8 billion year old - or so our best scientific methods tell us. But how do you learn the age of the universe when there’s no trace left of its beginnings?

The Nobel prize in physics this year went to black holes. Generally speaking. Specifically, it was shared by the astronomers who revealed to us the Milky Way’s central black hole and by Roger Penrose, who proved that in general...

Conformal Cyclic Cosmology is a story of the origin and the end of our universe from great mathematical physicist Sir Roger Penrose. It’s goes like this: the infinitely far future, when the universe has expanded exponentially to to an...