A tremendous revolution has occurred in the past four decades concerning our ultimate cosmic origins. While the Big Bang still plays an important role in the cosmic story, it is no longer considered to be the ultimate beginning or the birth of space and time. Cosmic inflation has changed our perspective forever. (Credit: Big Think)Since the dawn of history, humans have pondered our ultimate cosmic origins. Now in the 21st century, science has gone beyond the Big Bang. Have you ever thought about the Universe, and asked perhaps the most profound question of all: where did all of this ..read more

This illustration shows how binary stars interact with a supermassive black hole to create a population of hypervelocity stars that wind up getting gravitationally kicked so strongly, they get ejected from their home galaxy. This process should be at play in any galaxy with a supermassive black hole, including the nearby Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), shown at right. As a result, many hypervelocity stars originating from the LMC should now exist within the Milky Way. (Credit: CfA/Melissa Weiss)Just 165,000 light-years away, the Large Magellanic Cloud is suspected to house a supermassive black h ..read more

We normally conceive of our Universe as having emerged from a preceding period of cosmic inflation, with our Big Bang occurring where one region of inflating space ceased inflating and transitioned to being dominated by matter and radiation. However, in other locations, inflation continues indefinitely, giving rise to other baby (or bubble) universes, potentially with very different properties and conditions from our own. (Credit: Kavli IMPU)There are some 26 fundamental constants in nature, and their values enable our Universe to exist as it does. But where do they come from? Here i ..read more

When the proper conditions are achieved, even multiple fermions, which normally cannot occupy the same quantum state, can reach a state known as a Fermionic condensate, where they all achieve the lowest-energy configuration possible. This is the seventh state of matter. (Credit: Wolfgang Ketterle/MIT/Center for Ultracold Atoms)Under extreme conditions, matter takes on properties that lead to remarkable, novel possibilities. Topological superconductors included. How many states of matter are there? When you were young, you probably learned about the three that are most common to our experience ..read more

Although the Spitzer space telescope’s infrared views could reveal many features, such as the warped disk, within the Sombrero galaxy, the superior size, resolution, and wavelength capabilities of JWST show a large set of features that Spitzer simply couldn’t resolve. The scientific gains, as well as visual ones, are there for us all to reap, with the “blank sky” regions of JWST’s views returning additional science about the presence of “extra” photons that could result from dark matter-driven processes. (Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/STScI & NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI)On ..read more

This illustration shows a coronavirus molecule with a string of RNA inside. Although a SARS-CoV-2 virus might have a genome that’s only 30,000 base pairs long, about 1000 of those base pairs are different from its closest naturally-found relatives. Meanwhile, just a few small genetic changes can lead to it evading the immunity developed from prior infection(s), enabling it to infect humans again and again. (Credit: Annelisa Leinbach, eMirage / Adobe Stock)A new bill introduced into the US Senate claims to make us safer. Instead, it would destroy all virology research, and for no real  ..read more

This image shows a laser guide star being created towards the galactic center of the Milky Way. While the Milky Way’s plane shines prominently overhead in this photo, optical observatories find very few spiral and elliptical galaxies close to the Milky Way’s plane compared to the large numbers they find elsewhere. This led to the Milky Way’s plane being known as the “Zone of Avoidance,” a mystery that wasn’t solved until the 1960s. (Credit: G. Hüdepohl / atacamaphoto.com / ESO)Astronomers see spiral and elliptical nebulae nearly everywhere, except by the Milky Way’s plane. We didn’t know ..read more

This moving, zipping star field appears to depict an ultra-relativistic motion through space, extremely close to the speed of light. Under the laws of relativity, you neither reach nor exceed the speed of light if you’re made of matter. You might be able to approach it if you had a large-enough amount of an efficient-enough fuel, but you still need to obey the rules of relativity. (Credit: Jahobr/Nevadawest of Wikimedia Commons)Perhaps the most well-known equation in all of physics is Einstein’s E = mc². Does mass or energy increase, then, near the speed of light? One of the most puzzling ..read more

In July of 1969, humanity took our first steps on the surface of another world: the Moon. This was the crowning achievement of NASA and the space program in the 1960s, representing a global victory for science and human achievement. Now, in 2025, it’s time to step back onto the path of science once again, and bring about a 21st century civilization that surpasses even the 20th century’s greatest achievements. (Credit: NASA/Apollo 11/Neil Armstrong)We’ve wasted our time and resources ideologically policing and punishing each other for far too long. Here’s a better route to prosperity. In every ..read more

In the very early Universe, there were tremendous numbers of quarks, leptons, antiquarks, and antileptons of all species. After only a tiny fraction-of-a-second has elapsed since the hot Big Bang, most of these matter-antimatter pairs annihilate away, leaving a very tiny excess of matter over antimatter. How that excess came about is a puzzle known as baryogenesis, and it is one of the greatest unsolved problems in modern physics. (Credit: E. Siegel/Beyond the Galaxy) From the tiniest subatomic scales to the grandest cosmic structures of all, everything that exists depends on two things ..read more