The James Webb Space Telescope is set to launch into orbit in December 2021. Its mission is to search for the first light to ever shine in the universe.
What happened during the Big Bang?
FlashMovie/Shutterstock
A small add-on to existing gravitational wave detectors could reveal what happens to matter as it becomes a black hole, a process like the big bang in reverse.
No one knows what kicked off the Big Bang that eventually allowed the stars to begin forming.
Adolf Schaller for STScI
The term ‘Big Bang’ might make you think of a massive explosion. Put the thought out of your head. Rather than an explosion, it was the start of everything in the universe.
Artist’s rendering of a Jupiter-sized exoplanet and its host, a star slightly more massive than our sun. Image credit:
ESO/NASA
The Princeton cosmologist helped pioneer our current model of the universe and began a whole new branch of physics.
The South Pole Telescope and BICEP telescopes (pictured above) may discover clues that could teach us if there was something else ‘before’ the Big Bang.
Dr. Keith Vanderlinde/NSF
Helium lifts balloons and makes our voices squeak. But its supply on Earth is finite and is critical for modern industrial processes and medical imaging in hospitals. How worried should we be?
Galaxy history revealed by the Hubble Space Telescope.
NASA
Pretty much as soon as we understood what galaxies were, we realised they are all moving away from each other. And the ones that are further away are moving faster. In short, the universe is expanding.
Signals from the first stars to form in the universe have been picked up by a table-sized detector in a west Australian desert. The find also hints at an early interaction with dark matter.
Hawking proved that the Big Bang was physically possible.
Part of the new map of dark matter made from gravitational lensing measurements of 26 million galaxies in the Dark Energy Survey.
Chihway Chang/University of Chicago/DES collaboration
What caused the Big Bang is still a mystery. And that’s just one of the many unanswered questions, in spite of everything we do know about the birth of the Universe.