After decades of searching, astronomers have found a distinctive pattern of light, from spinning stars called pulsars, that suggests huge gravitational waves are creating gentle ripples in space-time across the universe

This artist's impression shows a pair of supermassive black holes circling each other and sending out gravitational waves, which affect the bright, shining pulsars.

Making a wormhole that a human could theoretically travel through would require an upside-down universe and negative energy

In a preview of what’s to come for Earth in about 5 billion years, astronomers have spotted a sun-like star gobbling up a planet and belching out a blast of light and energy

IN NOVEMBER 1997, a young physicist named Juan Maldacena proposed an almost ludicrously bold idea: that space-time, the fabric of the universe and apparently the backdrop against which reality plays out, is a hologram. For many working in the fields of particle physics and gravity at the time, Maldacena’s proposal was as surprising as it was ingenious. Before it was published, the notion of a holographic universe was “way out there”, says Ed Witten, a mathematical physicist at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton (IAS), New Jersey. “I would have described it as wild speculation.” And yet today, just…

Understanding the interactions between quantum physics and gravity within a black hole is one of the thorniest problems in physics, but quantum computers could soon offer an answer

Physicists have simulated strange objects from string theory to determine what they look like – if they exist, they could be mistaken for a black hole when imaged from very far away

There is a mismatch between two ways of measuring galactic mass. Dark matter is one way to solve it, but so is rewriting the laws of gravity, says Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

If we could detect them, cosmic neutrinos would paint a picture of the universe in the instant after it began. Physicist Martin Bauer has come up with a plan to do just that

Ultralight dark matter particles that behave like waves, called axions, seem to be a better match for gravitational lensing measurements than more traditional explanations for dark matter Evidence is growing for an ultralight dark matter particle called the axion. A study of light warped by galaxies has shown that it is better explained by axion dark matter than weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), which have long been the leading candidate for dark matter. Researchers are fairly sure that dark matter exists because of its gravitational effects, but so far all efforts to detect any dark matter particle directly have failed.…