Some of the universe’s oldest black holes swoop past our cosmic neighborhood at least once every decade, moving planets in their wake, a new study suggests. And if scientists can detect them, it would provide the first proof that these black holes exist as dark matter. Black holes, regions of immense gravity that even trap … Read more
Life has found a home on Earth for around 4 billion years. That’s a significant fraction of the universe’s 13.77 billion-year history. Presumably, if life arose here, it could have appeared anywhere. And for sufficiently broad definitions of life, it might even be possible for life to have appeared mere seconds after the Big Bang. … Read more
Astronomers have peered back to the dawn of the cosmos to observe time ticking five times more slowly in the early universe than it does now — finally proving a prediction that Albert Einstein made more than a century ago. Researchers spotted the extreme slow-motion effect in data taken from bright cosmic beacons known as … Read more
The first stars in the cosmos may have topped out at over 10,000 times the mass of the sun, roughly 1,000 times bigger than the biggest stars alive today, a new study has found. Nowadays, the biggest stars are 100 solar masses. But the early universe was a far more exotic place, filled with mega-giant … Read more
Ripples in space-time known as gravitational waves could help reveal the secrets at the dawn of time, just moments after the Big Bang, new research suggests. And physicists say they can learn more about these primeval gravitational waves using nuclear fusion reactors here on Earth. In a new study, physicists used equations that govern how … Read more
