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 ...

Once the most popular framework for physics beyond the Standard Model, supersymmetry is facing a reckoning—but many researchers are not giving up on it yet. The Standard Model of particle physics is ...

The Higgs boson is the only fundamental particle known to be scalar, meaning it has no quantum spin. This fact answers questions about our universe, but it also raises new ones. When it was first ...

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 ...

In the 1900s, Albert Einstein unified the concepts of space and time, giving us a useful new way to picture the universe. At the start of the 20th century, physicists had a problem: The speed of light ...

In 2023, the ALICE experiment was ready for their best year yet, until a mysterious signal threatened everything. As the LHC wraps up its 2025 lead-ion run, physicists recall how they worked together ...

Can a theory that isn’t completely testable still be useful to physics? What determines if an idea is legitimately scientific or not? This question has been debated by philosophers and historians of ...

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 ...

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 ...

Scientists are championing a relatively new technique as a method to understand the structure of the early universe in three dimensions. With enough time and magnifying power, a telescope can gather ...

Although scientists have yet to find the spooky stuff, they aren’t completely in the dark. There are a lot of things scientists don’t know about dark matter: Can we catch it in a detector? Can we make ...

From lightning to the death of electrons, the highest-energy form of light is everywhere. Gamma rays are the most energetic type of light, packing a punch strong enough to pierce through metal or ...