Physicists have made the most precise measurement of the neutron's lifetime, which may help answer questions about the early universe.

It has long been theorized that hydrogen, helium, and lithium were the only chemical elements in existence during the Big Bang, and that supernova explosions are responsible for transmuting these elements into heavier ones. Researchers are now challenging this and propose an alternative model for the formation of nitrogen, oxygen, and water based on the history of Earth's atmosphere. They postulate that the 25 elements with atomic numbers smaller than iron were created via an endothermic […]

The Universe is filled with energetic particles, such as X rays, gamma rays, and neutrinos. However, most of the high-energy cosmic particles' origins remain unexplained.

When the universe was about 3 billion years old, just 20% of its current age, it experienced the most prolific period of star birth in its history. But when NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in northern Chile gazed toward cosmic objects in this period, they found something odd: six early, massive, 'dead' galaxies that had run out of the cold hydrogen gas needed to make stars. Without more fuel for star formation, these galaxies were […]

While investigating the data of young, distant galaxies observed with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, astronomers noticed unexpected emissions coming from seemingly empty regions in space that, a global research team confirmed, came actually from two hitherto undiscovered galaxies heavily obscured by cosmic dust. This discovery suggests that numerous such galaxies might still be hidden in the early Universe, many more than researchers were expecting.