For most of us, “inflation” is a term that comes up only in conversations about the economy or flat tires. But for many cosmologists, inflation is the ultimate word in understanding how the universe ...

The 2013 Gruber Cosmology Prize recognizes Viatcheslav Mukhanov and Alexei Starobinsky for their formative contributions to inflationary theory, an essential component for understanding the evolution ...

The big bang wasn’t the start of everything, but it has been impossible to see what came before. Now a new kind of cosmology is lifting the veil on the beginning of time ...

Ever since the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe developed in the 1920s and 1930s, the idea has had its skeptics. The radical concept stated that the universe is expanding; run time ...

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American The shock waves are still reverberating from ...

DALLAS — Back in the old days, like half a century ago, many astronomers and physicists thought they understood the universe, more or less. It looked pretty much the same everywhere, so it probably ...

The standard model of cosmology includes a period of extremely rapid expansion at early times. This period, known as cosmological inflation, lasted for only a tiny fraction of a second, but provided ...

It may sound like something from a science fiction movie, but recent research from the Tufts Institute of Cosmology confirms the possibility that multiple universes could exist within black holes. The ...

Stephen Hawking and 32 of his fellow scientists have written an angry letter responding to a recent Scientific American article about how the universe began. In it, they declare their "categorical ...

On March 17th, physicists with the BICEP2 experiment announced they had detected the remnant of gravitational waves in the cosmic microwave background, the light left over from the big bang. Although ...