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Maciej Rebisz / Quanta Magazine The Universe as We Understand It May Be Impossible
A new conjecture in physics challenges the leading “theory of everything.”
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NASA / JPL–Caltech / GSFC / JAXA Astronomers Can’t Decide What the Sun Is Made Of
The concentration of metals in our star will determine when it dies, but scientists struggle to settle on an estimate.
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Photographer: Kiliii Yüyan / Art Director: Olena Shmahalo In the Garden of an Alien Hunter
When Victoria Meadows needs to ponder life on distant planets, she surrounds herself with earthly vegetation.
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ESA / Gaia / DPAC Galactic Archaeologists Begin Sifting Through Newly Illuminated Stars
The Milky Way's deep past is beginning to come into view.
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Olena Shmahalo / Quanta Magazine Doubt Surrounds the Only Experiment That Claims to See Dark-Matter Particles
For two decades, one research team has detected collisions between dark and ordinary matter—but no one else can replicate their findings.
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Jessica Kourkounis / Quanta Magazine A Powerful New Weapon in the Fight Against Shoddy Statistics
Using the wrong method to analyze a data set can yield misleading results. So one researcher is championing an approach that works for nearly everything.
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Lucy Reading-Ikkanda / Quanta Magazine Why Does the Universe Need to Be So Empty?
Physicists have long grappled with the perplexingly small weight of empty space.
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Olena Shmahalo / Quanta Magazine Physicists Found a Trick to Solve an ‘Impossible’ Puzzle of Gravity
The experiment would confirm that gravity is a quantum force.
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davidope / Quanta Magazine The Big Bang May Have Been One of Many
Our universe could be expanding and contracting eternally.
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Olena Shmahalo / Quanta Magazine A Mission to Classify Even the Weirdest Phases of Matter
Physicists are looking far beyond solids, liquids, and gases.
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Olena Shmahalo / Quanta Magazine The Best Explanation for Everything in the Universe
String theory is considered the leading “theory of everything,” but there’s still no empirical evidence for it.
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NASA Goddard Space Flight Center / CI Lab A New Way to Measure How Fast the Universe Is Expanding
Colliding neutron stars could settle the biggest debate in cosmology.
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Juan Cristóbal Cobo / Quanta Magazine The Physicist Modeling ISIS and the Alt-Right
The rise of new extremist groups is an impetus and a test case for physical models of terrorism and insurgency.
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Fermilab A New Way to Measure the Invisible Substances That Dominate the Universe
The Dark Energy Survey is the start of the next era of cosmology.
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Olena Shmahalo / Quanta Magazine The Universe Is as Spooky as Einstein Thought
In a brilliant new experiment, physicists have confirmed one of the most mysterious laws of the cosmos.
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Eric King / Quanta Explorers Find Passage to Earth's Dark Age
Geochemical signals from near the planet’s core are beginning to shed light on its first 50 million years, a period long viewed as inaccessible to science.
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Ilvy Njiokiktjien / Quanta Magazine Is the Search for Dark Matter a Wild Goose Chase?
A growing number of physicists think it may be.
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Olena Shmahalo / Quanta Magazine Back to the Drawing Board for Physics?
Decades of failed predictions show that nature might not work as expected.
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Olena Shmahalo / Quanta Magazine A Debate Over the Shape of the Invisible Universe
The more astronomers learn about dark matter, the more intriguing it becomes.
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NASA The Trick to Finding Life on Distant Planets
Is oxygen in an exoplanet's atmosphere a sign of living beings, or something more mundane?
