In the hunt for extraterrestrial life, we usually look for planets orbiting sun-like stars and icy moons. But there is another possible candidate—planets circling white dwarfs, the hot, dense remnants ...

Einstein’s theory of gravity may behave slightly differently across distances of billions of light-years, with gravity ...

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 ...

Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity describes how the fabric of space and time, or spacetime, is curved in response to mass. Our sun, for example, warps space around us such that planet ...

IN MARCH, a team of physicists announced that they had detected ripples in space-time produced at the universe’s birth. Their claims took the world by storm. One of my colleagues declared it the most ...

EVER since Arthur Eddington travelled to the island of Príncipe off Africa to measure starlight bending around the sun during a 1919 eclipse, evidence for Einstein’s theory of general relativity has ...

Albert Einstein’s mind reinvented space and time, foretelling a universe so bizarre and grand that it has challenged the limits of human imagination. An idea born in a Swiss patent office that evolved ...

For decades, astronomers have used distant supernovae as cosmic lighthouses to test fundamental physics and to measure the universe. For Joseph Farah, a fifth-year graduate student at UC Santa Barbara ...

General relativity describes gravity not as a force but as the curvature of spacetime produced by mass and energy. Matter tells spacetime how to curve, and this curved geometry guides the motion of ...