Tag Archives: Universe

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) continues to deliver awe-inspiring views of the cosmos and the art world has taken notice. Digital artist Ashley Zelinskie took that inspiration to the next level with the first of a three part exhibit in 2022, called “Unfolding the Universe: First Light” at Onassis ONX Studio in New York City.The exhibit highlighted NASA’s contributions …

We’ve grown up with the idea that the universe will expand forever, meaning that something called the “cosmological constant” is positive. Space keeps stretching, galaxies drift farther apart, and that seems final. A new analysis suggests that story might be wrong. It argues that expansion could slow, stop, and – far in the future – reverse. This idea posits that …

QUICK FACTS Date: Night of Oct. 5, 1923 Where: Mount Wilson Observatory, near Pasadena, California Who: Edwin Hubble On the night of Oct. 5 to 6, 1923, Edwin Hubble discovered a new star — and revealed the utter vastness of the universe. Hubble was looking at the cosmos with the 100-inch Hooker telescope at the Mount Wilson Observatory near Pasadena, …

Earth’s surface is a turbulent place. Mountains rise, continents merge and split, and earthquakes shake the ground. All of these processes result from plate tectonics, the movement of enormous chunks of Earth’s crust. This movement may be why life exists here. Earth is the only known planet with plate tectonics and the only known planet with life. Most scientists think …

Sign up for the Starts With a Bang newsletter Travel the universe with Dr. Ethan Siegel as he answers the biggest questions of all. Going all the way back to ancient times — sometimes attributed to Persia, other times to King Solomon, and still at other times to far eastern sources — one of the most important reminders of the …

For over a century, physics has been divided between the elegance of Einstein’s relativity and the strangeness of quantum mechanics. A new framework, the quantum memory matrix, suggests that spacetime itself is made of discrete “cells” that remember every interaction. Credit: Shutterstock What if the universe remembers? A bold new framework proposes that spacetime acts as a quantum memory. For …

The universe is approaching the midpoint of its 33-billion-year lifespan, a Cornell physicist calculates with new data from dark-energy observatories. After expanding to its peak size about 11 billion years from now, it will begin to contract – snapping back like a rubber band to a single point at the end.  Henry Tye, the Horace White Professor of Physics Emeritus …

Our Universe was ‘pre-heated’ in its early moments, according to a new study from the International Centre of Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR), challenging assumptions it emerged from an ultracold state. The discovery was made as astronomers hunted for an elusive signal from the Epoch of Reionization – the time when the first suns began to fire up about a billion …

In May 2019, astronomers picked up something strange in the fabric of spacetime. The LIGO and Virgo detectors recorded a gravitational wave that lasted just one-tenth of a second. The signal, known as GW190521, was unusual straight away because it didn’t look like the normal “chirps” usually produced when two black holes orbit one another before colliding. Instead, it sounded …

AI-generated illustration. Credit: ZME Science/Midjourney. Fire has always shaped the human story. Strike a match, watch the flare, and you’re tapping into something humans have relied on for at least 245,000 years. But despite its primal aura, fire is almost impossibly rare. It’s not just that Earth is the only place we’ve seen it — it may be the only …