Flashes of CreationPaul HalpernBasic Books, $30 The Big Bang wasn’t always a sure bet. For several decades in the 20th century, researchers wrestled with interpreting cosmic origins, or if there…
Category: Cosmology
Vera Rubin’s work on dark matter led to a paradigm shift in cosmology
Bright Galaxies, Dark Matter, and BeyondAshley Jean YeagerMIT Press, $24.95 Vera Rubin’s research forced cosmologists to radically reimagine the cosmos. In the 1960s and ’70s, Rubin’s observations of stars whirling…
Cosmic filaments may be the biggest spinning objects in space
Moons do it, stars do it, even whole galaxies do it. Now, two teams of scientists say cosmic filaments do it, too. These tendrils stretching hundreds of millions of light-years…
Fast radio bursts could help solve the mystery of the universe’s expansion
Astronomers have been arguing about the rate of the universe’s expansion for nearly a century. A new independent method to measure that rate could help cast the deciding vote. For…
Physicists’ devotion to symmetry has led them astray before
Second of two parts Physicists have a lot in common with Ponce de León and U2’s Bono. After decades of searching, they aren’t getting any younger. And they still haven’t…
The dark matter mystery deepens with the demise of a reported detection
First of two parts. Read part two. In mystery stories, the chief suspect almost always gets exonerated before the end of the book. Typically because a key piece of evidence…
Einstein’s theory of general relativity unveiled a dynamic and bizarre cosmos
Albert Einstein’s mind reinvented space and time, foretelling a universe so bizarre and grand that it has challenged the limits of human imagination. An idea born in a Swiss patent…
Dark matter clumps in galaxy clusters bend light surprisingly well
Dark matter just got even more puzzling. This unidentified stuff, which makes up most of the mass in the cosmos, is invisible but detectable by the way it gravitationally tugs…
Scientists can’t agree on how clumpy the universe is
The universe is surprisingly smooth. A new measurement reveals that the universe is less clumpy than predicted, physicists report in a series of papers posted July 30 at arXiv.org. The…
‘The End of Everything’ explores the ways the universe could perish
The End of EverythingKatie MackScribner, $26 Eventually, the universe will end. And it won’t be pretty. The universe is expanding at an accelerating clip, and that evolution, physicists expect, will…
