The Big Bang is often described as the explosive birth of the universe – a singular moment when space, time and matter sprang into existence. But what if this was not the beginning at all? What if our ...

Cosmic inflation is a popular scenario for the earliest phase in the evolution of the Universe CREDIT A. Ijjas, P.J. Steinhardt and A. Loeb (Scientific American, February 2017) Astrophysicists say ...

Scientists believe that in the very early universe, everything was incredibly tiny, chaotic, and full of random energy ripples, known as quantum foam. It was a state where spacetime was unstable, and ...

AUSTIN — Imagine a universe where the vast majority of matter is like an invisible ghost, permeating space yet remaining ...

As it studies cosmic microwaves, the Simons Observatory in Chile aims to help prove or disprove cosmic inflation, a notion that the universe expanded rapidly in the moment after the Big Bang. Two of ...

For a fraction of a second after the big bang occurred 13.8 billion years ago, most physicists believe, the newborn universe dramatically ballooned in size, jumping from being smaller than a proton to ...

A cosmological simulation study by researchers from the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has systematically revealed, for the first time, how the interaction ...

Is the universe 'tuned' to support life, and ultimately us? Physicists Nemanja Kaloper and Alexander Westphal have proposed ways to test this Anthropic principle. (Image of deep star field from the ...

The Universe is big, as Douglas Adams would say. The most distant light we can see is the cosmic microwave background (CMB), which has taken more than 13 billion years to reach us. This marks the edge ...

For a fraction of a second after the big bang occurred 13.8 billion years ago, most physicists believe, the newborn universe dramatically ballooned in size, jumping from being smaller than a proton to ...