A RATHER glib distinction is often made between the two pillars of modern physics. Quantum mechanics is the physics of the very small, while general relativity is the physics of the very large. That’s ...

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 ...

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 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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity has been wildly successful at describing how gravity works and how it shapes the large-scale structure of the universe. It’s summed up in a saying by the ...

Two recently observed black hole mergers, occurring just weeks apart in late 2024, have opened an extraordinary new window into the universe’s most extreme events. These collisions not only revealed ...

A peer-reviewed paper published in The European Physical Journal C presents a modification to Einstein’s general relativity that eliminates the singularities associated with the Big Bang and Big ...

The investigative minds at How to Survive utilize general relativity to explain the spaghettification and temporal distortion experienced by an observer crossing an event horizon.