The holy grail of theoretical physics is to come up with a quantum theory of gravity. But after a century of trying we really have no idea how close we are, or it it's even possible. But we shouldn't feel bad because it turns out that...

From hoverboards to flying cars to cloud cities, anti-gravity is a staple of science fiction and our dream of a less Earth-bound future. But in the real universe gravity appears to be a purely attractive force. Feels like its main MO is...

This is what we astronomers call a blob, or a smudge, if you want to get really technical. It may not look like much from here, but what do you expect for something near the literal edge of the observable universe. If you were there when...

The Moon has been one of the most important theoretical stepping stones to our understanding of the universe. We’ve long understood that it could also be our literal stepping stone: humanity’s first destination beyond our atmosphere.

Meet Alice and Bob, famous explorers of the abstract landscape of theoretical physics. Heroes of the gerdankenexperiment—the thought experiment—whose life mission is to find contradictions in the deepest layers of our theories. Today our...

Black holes are inevitable predictions of general relativity—our best theory of space, time and gravity. But they clash in multiple ways with quantum mechanics, our equally successful description of the subatomic world. One such clash is...

Cern's Large Hadron Collider routinely collides particles at energies equivalent to a fraction of a second after the Big Bang. If this worries you, then the following fact will either put you at ease or scare the hell out of you. And...

Solar activity is still increasing in a sunspot cycle that is proving way more intense than scientists predicted. Just how much stronger is it going to get?

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...

Scientists have been slowly extending the periodic table one element at a time, pushing to higher and higher masses, and have discovered some incredibly useful materials along the way. But the elements at the current end of the table are...

If we discover how to connect quantum mechanics with general relativity we’ll pretty much win physics. There are multiple theories that claim to do this, but it’s notoriously difficult to test them. They seem to require absurd...

If you track the motion of individual stars in the ultra-dense star cluster at the very center of the Milky Way you’ll see that they swing in sharp orbits around some vast but invisible mass—that’s the Sagittarius A* supermassive black...

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.

Imagine a world where humanity masters every planetary resource available to it—our first step on the famous Kardeshev scale of technological advancement. How distant is that step? Will we even become a true Type-1 civilization, and how...

Every good nerd knows that E=mc^2. Every great nerd knows that, really, E^2=m^2c^4+p^2c^2 Want to know what that even means? Sure, I’ll tell you, but today I’d like to invite you to an even higher level of nerdom with extra bits to...

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...

What does an electron really look like? I mean, if we zoom in all the way. Is it a sizeless speck of charge? Is it a multidimensional vortex of quantum strangeness? Is it the boundary of a tiny universe with universe-electrons of its...

What do you get if you take something that’s infinitely massive and combining with something else that’s negative infinitely massive? You get a single electron, at least that’s what it looks like in our most precise way of describing the...

Dark matter has eluded us for many decades. Even our most advanced particle colliders and sophisticated underground detectors have come up short. But it may be that we can finally solve this mystery with a much simpler experiment,...

The universe is expanding and that expansion is accelerating under the power of dark energy and eventually all matter and energy will be dispersed over such unthinkable distances that nothing can stop space from blowing up infinitely....

At one-one-thousandth of a second after the Big Bang, the great annihilation event should have wiped out all matter, leaving a universe of only radiation. Why still don't know why any matter survived. Well, a new finding from the LHC...

Around 2 billion years ago, life had plateaued in complexity, ruined the atmosphere, and was on the verge of self-annihilation. But then something strange and potentially extremely lucky happened that enabled endless new evolutionary...