This story comes from our special January 2021 issue, “The Beginning and the End of the Universe.” Click here to purchase the full issue. From a dark site on a clear winter night, the sky in ...

There were two periods of exponential expansion in the Universe: one today, dark energy, and one long ago, inflation. Are they related?

This story comes from our special January 2021 issue, “The Beginning and the End of the Universe.” Click here to purchase the full issue. Some 4.6 billion years ago, our Sun was born from a ...

The team's results suggest that the mysterious glow named QSO1 is a black hole with a mass equivalent to 50 million Suns. If ...

New computer simulations suggest the first magnetic fields that emerged after the Big Bang were much weaker than expected — ...

Astronomers have discovered "dust-shrouded supermassive black holes" in the early universe, less than 1 billion years after ...

The Big Bang isn't the ultimate beginning, but was preceded by a phase called cosmic inflation. Here's how we're finally learning about it.

In the beginning, there was … well, maybe there was no beginning. Perhaps our universe has always existed — and a new theory of quantum gravity reveals how that could work. "Reality has so many things ...

Quentin Smith, The Uncaused Beginning of the Universe, Philosophy of Science, Vol. 55, No. 1 (Mar., 1988), pp. 39-57 ...

What happened before the Big Bang? And what happened before that? Stephen Hawking's answer—there was no beginning—is now the subject of intense debate.