THE LAST TRANSMISSIONStories from the Edge of ScienceCOLLECTION / THE UNIVERSE DOES NOT EXPLAIN ITSELF
Dark matter, fundamental physics, and observations that refuse to fit neatly inside the models.
64 TRANSMISSIONS
A real physics paper asked whether a universe could be born in an experiment. Follow that question far enough, and the mystery becomes much larger than the identity of its creator.
Read the illustrated article
At CERN, physicists built a machine to drop the one kind of atom that destroys itself on contact. Its fall closed an elegant escape route from the oldest mystery in existence.
The black hole information paradox led physicists to a possibility that sounds like fiction: space itself may emerge from something deeper.
Read the illustrated article
The Big Bang remains one of the greatest successes in science. The unsettling part is what happens when we measure it too precisely.
A strange 43 GeV line from three galaxy clusters and a separate gamma-ray halo around the Milky Way are forcing physicists to ask extraordinary questions.
Earth is overflowing with silicon. Carbon is comparatively scarce. Yet every living thing we have ever discovered is built around carbon, and the reason reaches from the sand beneath your feet to a st
Green peas, blueberries and purple galaxies sound like an astronomy joke. Instead, some of these tiny objects may be giving us our closest look at the galaxies that helped end the cosmic dark ages.
Read the illustrated article
We grow up believing light is freedom. In reality, it may be the wall that keeps every civilization in the universe alone.
Read the illustrated article
There is something at the center of every atom in your body so dense that a teaspoon of it would weigh close to a trillion kilograms. The stranger question is why it exists at all.
A Scottish observatory recorded a persistent frequency that researchers could not identify. Their next test may require an instrument as large as the planet.
Read the illustrated article
After a century of searching, astronomers have captured their clearest evidence yet of a young blue-white star moving through the atmosphere of the most famous red supergiant in our sky.
Read the illustrated article
A hidden dimension could connect dark matter, dark energy, and the strangest weakness in physics. Now the universe may have given us our first clue.
Read the illustrated article
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory has barely begun looking at the sky. It has already uncovered a stellar system so faint that it may represent an entire galaxy we somehow failed to notice.
Astronomers finally found the edge of IC 1101. Then they discovered the largest known galaxy is still feeding.
Read the illustrated article
Astronomers thought the Radcliffe Wave was a cosmic oddity. Now they have found an entire hidden architecture of enormous gas structures in our neighborhood.
After a 50-year search, X(2370) may be the clearest evidence yet for a glueball, a particle made mostly from the carriers of the strong force.
Read the illustrated article
JWST found what may be a proposed kind of object: a black hole hiding inside a solar-system-sized atmosphere of gas. The discovery could dismantle one of the most troubling assumptions in modern cosmology.
Read the illustrated article
A black hole hiding inside a gas cocoon 660 million years after the Big Bang may have exposed a flaw in how astronomers weigh the early universe’s darkest objects.
Read the illustrated article
Astronomers are finding massive black holes far from the galactic centers where they belong. Some announce themselves by killing a star. One may have left a 200,000-light-year trail of newborn suns.
Read the illustrated article
Gravity does not need to pull on light. It changes the shape of the future light is trying to enter.
Read the illustrated article
Astronomers may have found a companion circling through the atmosphere of one of the largest and most unstable stars in our sky. What they detected may be a second star, a shock wave, or both.
Read the illustrated article
How an ordinary star, a citizen scientist, and 1,470 years of ancient light brought humanity together to listen for another civilization.
False vacuum decay is a real idea in quantum field theory. It suggests the universe may be sitting in a temporary state, and if that state changed, the laws of physics could change with it.
In 1977, a radio telescope heard something for 72 seconds. Nearly fifty years later, the most frightening question may not be what sent it, but whether humanity should ever answer.
What if the silence between the stars is not emptiness, but a warning?
Read the illustrated article
One bends space around a ship. The other turns spacetime into infrastructure.
A dark science documentary about Death Star physics, relativistic kill vehicles, antimatter, Nicoll-Dyson beams, and the terrifying difference between impossible and merely difficult.
Read the illustrated article
Antimatter propulsion sounds like the future. Antimatter containment failure sounds like the universe deleting the evidence.
Read the illustrated article
The show made Liu Cixin’s impossible universe easier to watch, but the physics did not survive untouched.
Read the illustrated article
Greg Egan’s Orthogonal Trilogy may be the most ambitious alternate universe ever constructed in hard science fiction.
Read the illustrated articleFROM THE VISUAL ARCHIVE
Read the investigation ↗