It’s fair to say that black holes may be the scariest objects in the universe. Happily for us, the nearest is probably many light-years away. Unless of course, Planck relics are a thing - in which case they might be literally everywhere.

What is inside a black hole? Inevitable crushing doom? Gateways to other universes? Weird, multidimensional libraries? If you’ve ever wanted to know then you might be in luck - Some physicists have argued that you’re inside one right now.

The moment you started observing reality, you hopelessly polluted any conclusions you might make about it. The anthropic principle guarantees that you are NOT seeing the universe in most typical state. But used correctly, this highly...

It was pretty impressive when LIGO detected gravitational waves from colliding black holes. Well we’ve just taken that to the next level with a galaxy-spanning gravitational wave detector that may have detected a foundational element of...

The Fine Structure Constant is one the strangest numbers in all of physics. It’s the job of physicists to worry about numbers, but there’s one number that physicists have stressed about more than any other. That number is 0.00729735256 -...

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

Hook up an old antenna to your TV and scan between channels. The static buzz you hear is mostly due to the ambient radio produced by our noisy pre-galactic civilization. But around one percent of that buzz is something very different –...

Every astronomy textbook tells us that soon after the Big Bang, there was a period of exponentially accelerating expansion called cosmic inflation. In a tiny fraction of a second, inflationary expansion multiplied the size of the...

The search for a single number: the hubble constant, which is the rate of expansion of our universe, has consumed astronomers for generations. Finally, two powerful and independent methods have refined its measurement to unprecedented...

Invisible to the naked eye, our night sky is scattered with the 100s of billions of galaxies the fill the known universe. Like the stars, these galaxies form constellations – hidden patterns that echo the reverberations of matter and...

Black holes are really only dangerous if you get too close. Ha, who am I kidding. It turns out they may be responsible for ending star formation across the entire universe.
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When we first realized that black holes could have...

Reality has cracks in it. Universe-spanning filaments of ancient Big Bang energy, formed from topological defects in the quantum fields, aka cosmic strings. They have subatomic thickness but prodigious mass and they lash through space at...

Our universe started with the big bang. But only for the right definition of “our universe”. And of “started” for that matter. In fact, probably the Big Bang is nothing like what you were taught.

A hundred years ago we discovered...

Now that we have a primer on the aspects of the Big Bang Theory that we know definitely happened, let’s look further into what we don’t yet know, and how the theory could progress in the future. Since there is a discrepancy between...

Throughout history, there has been much speculation about what the fate of the universe would be. Many theorized that the universe would eventually succumb to the pull of gravity, and reverse its expansion in what was being called ‘The...

In astronomy we study things that are very far away. It’s a powerful challenge because even the brightest objects are almost impossibly faint when you view them from the other side of the universe. But there’s an up side. If the light...

When we scan the heavens with giant telescopes we see galactic cannibalism everywhere. We see moments that appear frozen on the human timescale, but are really snapshots of the incredibly violent process of galaxy formation. This is how...

Precious metals like gold, silver, platinum, and rhodium are expensive because they're rare in Earth's crust. But are they rare in the universe? Why is it so hard to make some of the chemical elements? Where do heavy metals come from,...

I recently got to sit down with physicist and science communicator extraordinaire Prof. Brian Cox. Did we talk about black holes, the Big Bang, or alien worlds? Nope! We talked about biology. Specifically, what is “life” and how did it...

I don’t want to alarm you, but the world is going to end. All of this. Gone. And scientists are certain all of this will happen. On the bright side this isn’t going to happen for 4-5 billion years. It makes me wonder: In a universe...

We actually have a pretty good idea of what might have happened before the Big Bang. That is, as long as we define the Big Bang as the extremely hot, dense, rapidly expanding universe that is described by Einstein’s equations. That...

HAS SPACE ALWAYS BEEN BLACK? As long as we've been around, YES. But the universe gets much more exciting, AND much BRIGHTER, as we start winding our clocks back to the early days of the universe. Near the beginning of the universe, when...

Space is big, and it’s getting bigger. But where does all that new space actually come from? And is it popping into existence all around you right now? Is that why the remote control is always further away than I thought?

There’s an absolute limit to our access to the universe beyond our own galaxy. There’s a limit to what we can ever hope to explore or send signals to, and a very different limit to what we can ever hope to witness. Today we’re going to...