Big Bang Theory

The 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics recognizes three scientists for improving our understanding of the universe's history and Earth's place in the cosmos.

Few things are as mysterious as dark matter. Now, a physicist from Johns Hopkins University has outlined a new theory that helps to explain the stuff but at the same time makes it seem even more bizarre. According to the study, dark matter may have originated before the Big Bang.

Astronomers have finally found the very first molecule to ever form in the universe. The helium hydride ion (HeH+) has long been a key theoretical part of how the chemistry of the cosmos kicked off. Now the first unambiguous evidence of the molecule in a planetary nebula has been found​.

Astronomers have identified one of the oldest stars ever found, which appears to be just one generation removed from the beginning of the universe itself. Being relatively close to Earth, the find could mean our galactic neighborhood is much older than previously thought.

Elements like oxygen, carbon and nitrogen weren’t very common until the first stars had fired up, burnt out and exploded. Now, astronomers using ALMA have detected the most distant – and hence, earliest – signature of oxygen, in a galaxy 13.28 billion light-years away.

Renowned physicist Stephen Hawking passed away earlier this year, but his legacy to science will live on. His final theory on the origin of the universe has now been published, and it offers an interesting departure from earlier ideas about the nature of the “multiverse.”

To look through space is to look through time. Astronomers have now peered right back to the “Cosmic Dawn” – when the first stars were beginning to fire up – by picking up an extremely faint radio signal that marks the earliest evidence of hydrogen, just 180 million years after the Big Bang.

At a distance of about 13 billion lightyears, the most distant supermassive black hole known so far has been spotted. That incredible distance means it dates back to when the first stars blinked on, which raises the question of how a black hole that big arose so soon after the universe began.

Next time you’re untangling your earbuds, remember that knots may have played a crucial part in kickstarting our universe, and without them we wouldn’t live in 3D. That’s the strange story pitched by physicists in a new paper, to help plug a few plot holes in the origin story of the universe.

When the universe was a few microseconds old, it was a soupy substance called quark-gluon plasma, exhibiting a host of unusual quantum effects previously only thought to occur just after the Big Bang. For the first time, IBM researchers have now observed a gravitational anomaly in earthly materials

The Lambda Cold Dark Matter model suggests that 68 percent of the universe is made up of dark energy. But a new study has questioned whether dark energy exists, citing simulations that found that accounting for the structure of the cosmos, the gap in the theory, which dark energy fills, vanishes.

The question of why time moves forwards, and not backwards, has long been on the minds of physicists. Now, a professor at UC Berkeley has a new theory: as the universe expands, it drives the expansion of time, which creates a constant series of new “now” moments.