Spacetime wrinkles known as cosmic strings, which might have formed in the early Universe, could be a dominant source of gravitational waves at ultrahigh frequencies, according to new calculations.

A decades-old idea is quietly regaining attention in theoretical physics: ancient structures embedded in the universe’s fabric could reshape current understanding of time. Long dismissed as fringe ...

The universe is expanding; we’ve had evidence of that for about a century. But just how quickly celestial objects are receding from each other is still up for debate. It’s no small feat to measure the ...

The Nature Index 2026 Research Leaders reveal the leading institutions and countries/territories in the natural sciences, health sciences, applied sciences and social sciences, according to their ...

A new study achieves unprecedented accuracy in modelling extreme cosmic events like black hole and neutron star collisions by calculating the fifth post-Minkowskian (5PM) order, crucial for ...

Today’s mysterious gravitational-wave background may preserve clues about how the Universe’s first supermassive black holes formed. Descendants of hypothetical Dark Stars could be responsible for a ...

In November 2023, a faint shudder passed through a pair of L-shaped tunnels in Washington state and Louisiana. It had been travelling for a very long time. The signal, once the collaboration’s ...

An international team of researchers has announced a significant advancement in gravitational-wave astronomy, with the detection of 128 new cosmic collisions involving black holes and neutron stars.

Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman. Today we’re leaving the podcast studio to take you on a field trip to the LIGO Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of ...

The Nature Index 2026 Research Leaders reveal the leading institutions and countries/territories in the natural sciences, health sciences, applied sciences and social sciences, according to their ...