Paul Sutter

New research suggests that a wandering companion may have played a role in Betelgeuse's antics of late 2019.

Researchers have proposed what's perhaps the most exotic explanation to date for the source of the universe's seed magnetic field: cosmic strings.

A model of exotic dark matter suggests that the first stars may have formed not as individuals, but as tiny pockets embedded in gigantic, pancake-like sheets.

The top quark is about 100 trillion times heavier than the up quark. But why?

A team of physicists has found that the remnant of a neutron star merger observed in 2019 has just the right mass to be a strange hypothetical quark star.

Electrons were once thought to orbit a nucleus much as planets orbit the sun. That picture has since been obliterated by modern quantum mechanics.

The concept of atoms had been floating around off and on for a few millennia, but it took some clever experimentation to pinpoint their existence.

Some interpretations of quantum mechanics propose that our entire universe is described by a single universal wave function that constantly splits and multiplies.

In a new paper, scientists outline how we can look for clues any alien visitors to our solar system may have left behind.

Many white dwarfs host planets that may lie within the habitable zones of those stars and may even support life. Now, scientists have outlined how to hunt for that possible life.

Uranus is just plain weird, and one of the weirdest things about it is its tilt.

A new understanding inspired by string theory shows that our universe may be more stable than we previously thought.

Black holes go boom in several ways.

Astronomers know of only a few dozen examples of these active asteroids, but they suspect more are out there — and you can join the hunt.

If you see a giant red star surrounded by a thick shroud of material, watch out — the star will likely explode within a few years.

Lagrange found that the difference between an object's kinetic energy and potential energy unlocked something deeply profound about the universe.

One hypothesis for the nature of dark matter is that some of it could be self-interacting, meaning the individual particles interact slightly with one another.

Scientists think that when dark photons collect around black holes, they can get trapped and boosted to high energies, where they might transform into other particles (or even just normal photons).

Astronomers hope to use pulsars scattered around the galaxy as a giant gravitational wave detector. But why do we need them, and how do they work?

Dark energy could be caused by pressure from giant voids of nothingness that may be flinging the universe apart.

New research suggests a way for black holes to merge quickly: They must be caught in the accretion disk of a supermassive companion.

It's true that the dark matter hypothesis has its shortcomings — and, of course, we haven't found any dark matter particles yet. But the truth is that the alternatives are much worse.

But could these giant, rocky planets actually sustain the conditions for life? Or is life limited to smaller planets like our own?

A new hypothesis proposes that a large fraction of dark matter may be bound up inside tight balls the size of Neptune — so-called dark matter planets.