As physicists continue their struggle to find and explain the origin of dark matter, the approximately 80% of the matter in the universe that we can't see and so far haven't been able to detect, ...

Quintessential inflation presents a unified paradigm in which a single scalar field drives both the rapid expansion of the early Universe and its current accelerated expansion. In this framework, the ...

Effective Field Theory (EFT) has emerged as a unifying framework for describing the physics of cosmological inflation by systematically organising possible interactions of the inflaton—the ...

The search for evidence of what happened during the universe’s first instants — and a long-sought confirmation of the theory ...

The Big Bang is often presented as if science has completely solved the beginning of the universe: everything started in one unimaginably hot, dense state, expanded outward and eventually became the ...

What if there was no beginning of time?

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory have completed two of the largest ...

An apparent shift in the value of an important inflation parameter may be an artifact of differences between cosmological datasets. Ferreira and her colleagues compared BAO information indirectly ...

Cosmic inflation is a popular scenario for the earliest phase in the evolution of the Universe CREDIT A. Ijjas, P.J. Steinhardt and A. Loeb (Scientific American, February 2017) Astrophysicists say ...

We live in a golden age for learning about the universe. Our most powerful telescopes have revealed that the cosmos is surprisingly simple on the largest visible scales. Likewise, our most powerful ...