As physicists continue their struggle to find and explain the origin of dark matter, the approximately 80% of the matter in the universe that we can't see and so far haven't been able to detect, ...

It's a discovery that could overturn our understanding of the cosmos at its most fundamental level: the universe might not be uniform in all directions, even on gigantic scales. Based on data ...

Some of the hardest questions in cosmology begin where the usual math gives up. Push Einstein’s theory far enough back toward the Big Bang, and the equations run into a singularity, a point where ...

During the inflationary epoch the Universe underwent an exponential expansion driven by a scalar inflaton field. Quantum fluctuations of this field and of the metric were stretched beyond the Hubble ...

Inflationary cosmology posits a brief epoch of accelerated expansion driven by one or more scalar fields. In realistic scenarios, quantum fluctuations on super-Hubble scales accumulate and induce ...

Repulsive gravity at the quantum scale would have flattened out inhomogeneities in the early universe First light The cosmic microwave background, as imaged by the European Space Agency’s Planck ...

For decades, one of the biggest questions in cosmology has remained frustratingly out of reach: what, if anything, existed before the Big Bang? Now, researchers are using advanced computational ...