At the end of a lecture on astronomy, describing how the planets orbit the Sun, a little old lady at the back of the room stood up and said: "What you've told us is all rubbish. The world is really a ...

Most of the matter in the universe may be made out of particles that possess an unusual, donut-shaped electromagnetic field called an anapole. This proposal, which endows dark matter particles with a ...

For decades, astronomers have treated dark matter as the invisible scaffolding of the cosmos, a mysterious substance that ...

Researchers have been looking at everything, including supernovas, trying to uncover the mysteries of dark matter. Recent scientific studies suggest that dark matter might not be a particle hiding in ...

Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to ...

The universe's matter-antimatter asymmetry, where matter significantly outweighs antimatter despite their theoretically equal creation at the Big Bang, remains a major unsolved problem in physics.

For various, typically historical reasons, even the best physicists claim things that sound egregious to modern observers. That doesn’t necessarily mean these ideas are completely useless—if anything, ...

At the center of our galaxy, something incredibly heavy is pulling the strings. Stars ...

If you could step back a few quadrillion miles and look at the Milky Way from the outside, you’d see a magnificent, glowing pinwheel of stars and gas, its arms curving majestically outward from a huge ...