Collapsing stars could form gravastars instead of black holes
A black hole is supposed to be the last word in stellar collapse: matter falls inward, spacetime caves…
Time May Not Exist Everywhere in the Universe
Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story: Past attempts to reconcile quantum theory with relativity have…
Can Our Model of the Cosmos Work Without Dark Energy? New Research Says It Can
Dark energy has been a mysterious element of cosmological equation since it was proposed three decades ago, but…
A Strange Black Hole Mystery Has Stumped Physicists Since 1993. Researchers May Finally Have the Answer
In 1993, Canadian physicist Matthew Choptuik demonstrated black holes may emerge spontaneously from critical collapse, during which spacetime…
A Physical Warp Drive Was Supposed to Be Impossible. Then These Scientists Found a Loophole.
In a surprising paper from 2021, scientists Alexey Bobrick and Gianni Martire suggested that they’d nailed down a…
Faint black hole ‘ringing’ provides a sharper test of Einstein’s gravity
When two black holes crash together, the violence does not end at impact. The newly formed black hole…
Darkness Can Move Faster Than Light Without Breaking the Laws of Physics
Artistic depiction of the darkness measurement. Image not to scale. Physicists have experimentally confirmed a strange prediction: the…
Gravity holds across cosmos, proving Newton and Einstein right
Scientists have tested gravity across some of the largest structures in the universe and found that it behaves…
New Theory Says We’ve Been Overcomplicating the Big Bang
One of the greatest unsolved problems in physics concerns unifying quantum mechanics and general relativity—two equally successful theories…
The physics of no return: What actually happens if you get pulled into a black hole
In 1916, only a year after Albert Einstein had published his general theory of relativity, Karl Schwarzschild used…
Distance in space is an illusion
Andromeda sounds far away because 2.5 million light-years sounds far away. It lands with authority. It feels exact.…
Expanding catalog of black hole collisions is rewriting the history of the universe
Between May 2023 and January 2024, a global network of gravitational-wave detectors picked up 128 new cosmic signals,…