Universe | featured news

A $2 billion experiment on the International Space Station is on the verge of explaining one of the more mysterious building blocks of the universe: The dark matter that helps hold the cosmos together....

New results from a look into the split second after the Big Bang indicate the universe is a bit older than previously thought but the core concepts of the cosmos - how it began, what it's made of and where it's going - seem to be on the right track....

Scientists working at the world's biggest atom smasher near Geneva have announced they are confident that the new subatomic particle discovered last summer is a version of the long-sought Higgs boson. The particle bears key attributes of the so-called "God particle" that was theorized nearly a half-century ago as fundamental to the creation of the universe.

A subatomic particle discovered last year that may be the long-sought Higgs boson might doom our universe to an unfortunate end, researchers say. The mass of the particle, which was uncovered at the world's largest particle accelerator — the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva — is a key ingredient in a calculation that portends the future of space and time.

The eXtreme Deep Field (XDF) focuses on a small patch of the constellation Fornax, containing some 5,500 galaxies. The image was culled from 10 years of photos of the same region of space shown in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, which was last updated in 2009, based on data gathered in 2003 and 2004.

Imagine that the visible universe and everything in it was once contained in a volume many times smaller than the size of a single atom. With a quantum theory of gravity, we may be able to trace the Big Bang expansion back to its very beginning, and understand precisely how our universe arose, presumably from nothing.

If the discovery of the Higgs boson particle pans out, could that lead to a new array of mind-bending technologies result? Theoretically, it's possible, says Arizona State University physicist Lawrence Krauss; but practically, it's unlikely.

Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.

Physicists investigating the make-up of the universe said on Wednesday they were closing in on the long-sought but elusive Higgs boson they believe was key to turning debris from the Big Bang into stars, planets and finally life.

Scientists say they have found evidence of the existence of the Higgs boson, a never-before-seen subatomic particle long thought to be a fundamental building block of the universe. In a highly anticipated press conference, researchers announced that two independent experiments at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva have turned up signs of the so-called "God particle."