The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope will be named for an influential astronomer who left the field better than she found it. The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, a flagship astronomy and astrophysics ...

The fundamental particle of light is both ordinary and full of surprises. What physicists refer to as photons, other people might just call light. As quanta of light, photons are the smallest possible ...

Perplexed by gravity? Don’t let it get you down. Gravity: we barely ever think about it, at least until we slip on ice or stumble on the stairs. To many ancient thinkers, gravity wasn’t even a ...

Our best model of particle physics explains only about 5 percent of the universe. The Standard Model is a thing of beauty. It is the most rigorous theory of particle physics, incredibly precise and ...

Neutrinos don’t seem to get their mass in the same way as other particles in the Standard Model. In 1998, researchers made a discovery that challenged their understanding of particle physics and ...

As technology improves, scientists discover new ways to search for theorized dark matter particles called axions. In the early 1970s, physics had a symmetry problem. According to the Standard Model, ...

Physicists in the United States support the development of an off-shore Higgs Factory. In 1964, the same year the Beatles rocked their way into the hearts of Americans on The Ed Sullivan Show, British ...

The answer has to do with dark matter’s role in shaping the cosmos. Half a century after Vera Rubin and Kent Ford confirmed that a form of invisible matter—now called dark matter—is required to ...

A discrepancy between different measurements of the Hubble constant makes scientists question whether something is amiss in our understanding of the universe. Few numbers have gotten under astronomers ...

Just over 40 years ago, a new theory about the early universe provided a way to tackle multiple cosmological conundrums at once. For Alan Guth, insight into the origins of the universe started in a ...

Hadrons count among their number the familiar protons and neutrons that make up our atoms, but they are much more than that. In the early 1900s, physicists were trying to find the source of a ...

For more than two decades, amateur photographer Dale Carter has documented the physicists who come to the Black Hills for their research. Photography is sometimes thought of as one part skill and one ...