Dark matter is thought to be ubiquitous, surrounding galaxies and helping to create the largest objects in the universe. But no one knows what it is made of. Now, a new theoretical study presents a unique and surprising scenario that may provide some of the missing pieces of the puzzle. Some of the dark matter … Read more
A photon from a star billions of light-years away takes no time to reach a telescope. It’s not too little time. There is nothing. That result is not a measured or poetic way of speaking. It comes directly from the mathematics of special relativity, and it points to another strange thing about the nature of … Read more
A Theory of Gravity That Could Rewrite the Universe’s First Minutes The first fraction of a second after the Big Bang has always posed a problem. Physics can explain a lot about the universe once it’s stable and expanding, but in the beginning, when heat and energy were extremes, it was still hard to pin … Read more
In 1916, just a year after Albert Einstein published his general theory of relativity, Karl Schwarzschild used mathematical calculations to show this: If enough mass were packed into a very small volume, then this dense enough mass would create a region where the gravitational force is so strong that nothing, including light, could escape from … Read more