When the theory of relativity appeared in the early 1900s, it upended centuries of science and gave physicists a new understanding of space and time. Isaac Newton saw space and time as fixed, but in ...

For years, astronomers have wondered why real-life versions of Tatooine are so rare. With thousands of confirmed exoplanets and countless binary star systems in our galaxy, planets orbiting two suns ...

Einstein’s general theory of relativity can be summed up in just 12 words: “Space-time tells matter how to move; matter tells space-time how to curve”. But this short description from the physicist ...

LAST month, I answered a reader question about space-time expansion. They wanted to know what space-time is expanding into, given that we scientists tend to analogise with a balloon that is being ...

Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity predicts so much about the universe at large, including the existence of gravitational lenses or "Einstein rings." And yet his famous equations struggle ...

A huge amount of mysterious dark energy is necessary to explain cosmological phenomena, such as the accelerated expansion of the Universe, using Einstein's theory. But what if dark energy was just an ...

If the universe were a soup, it would be more of a chunky minestrone than a silky-smooth tomato bisque. Sprinkled with matter that clumps together due to the insatiable pull of gravity, the universe ...

Simulated universe: EAGLE collaboration, J Schaye et al 2015. MNRAS, CC BY-SA A renewed suggestion that dark energy may not be real — dispensing with 70% of the stuff in the universe — has reignited a ...