Science

Cosmic vision

By showing us a new cosmos, the discoveries of the James Webb Space Telescope will ripple through our moral universe

Claire Isabel Webb

Thriving on Mars

Dust storms, long distances and freezing temperatures make living on Mars magnificently challenging. How will we do it?

Simon Morden

Cogitating black holes

The Universe cannot always be understood through observation. Instead, physicists explore by devising thought experiments

Michael Dine

Dark horses in the cosmos

Could primordial black holes from the beginning of time explain ‘dark matter’, the mysterious missing mass in the Universe?

Briley Lewis

Revisiting ‘Powers of Ten’ – what we’ve learned about the Universe since 1977

7 minutes

The search for alien tech

There’s a new plan to find extraterrestrial civilisations by the way they live. But if we can see them, can they see us?

Corey S Powell

Building ‘bigger and better’ has pushed cosmology forward. Can it take it any further?

7 minutes

A non-Standard model

Most cosmologists say dark matter must exist. So far, it’s nowhere to be found. A widely scorned rival theory explains why

David Merritt

Contact

An alien-made artefact or just interstellar debris? What ʻOumuamua says about how science works when data is scarce

Matthew Bothwell

The cosmic chasm

Physics as we know it is elegant and exquisitely accurate. It tells almost nothing about the deepest riddles of the Universe

Pedro G Ferreira

A cyclical, forgetful Universe – Roger Penrose details an astonishing origin hypothesis

17 minutes

Big space

Our planet is a tiny porthole, looking over a cosmic sea. Can we learn what lies beyond our own horizons of perception?

Katie Mack

Does dark matter exist?

Dark matter is the most ubiquitous thing physicists have never found: it’s time to consider alternative explanations

Ramin Skibba

As above, so below – an artist finds the cosmos in a microscopic chemical reaction

6 minutes

Naming the Universe

How the quick thinking of internationally minded astronomers avoided stamping the solar system with petty European rivalries

Stephen Case

Watch the rare, awesome spectacle as Mercury passes between the Earth and Sun

1 minute

Fate of the Universe

Are we part of a dying reality or a blip in eternity? The value of the Hubble Constant could tell us which terror awaits

Corey S Powell

Turns out that, even when Einstein was wrong, he was kind of right

6 minutes

How the Rosetta space probe brings a distant comet into vivid focus

3 minutes

Extremely small and incredibly fast, muons offer amazing proof of special relativity

5 minutes

The cosmic now

Are you here now? Impossible to say. The idea that any group of events can truly happen at once is just an illusion

Anthony Aguirre

Monsters in the dark

The Universe’s biggest galaxies could hold the key to the birth of the cosmos. Why are these behemoths so hard to find?

Matthew Bothwell