It has been one year since the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope and six months since the first pictures were released. Astronomers are already learning unexpected things about the early universe.
Solutions to Einstein’s famous equations back in the 20th century describe ‘wormholes,’ or tunnels through space-time.
Mark Garlick/Science Photo Library via GettyImages
An astrophysicist explains what wormholes are and how these theoretical space-time tunnels have popped up in the solutions to a set of decadesold equations.
James Webb has peered into the distant Universe.
NASA
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?
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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