STEM Challenges

We know dark matter is real — but we have no idea what it is made of. Scientists have proposed many candidates, from exotic new particles to ancient b...

Einstein's general relativity predicts that mass bends light. Astronomers have turned this effect into a powerful tool to map the invisible — using th...

In the 1970s, astronomer Vera Rubin made a startling discovery: stars at the edges of galaxies orbit just as fast as stars near the center. This defie...

From the first photons after inflation to the formation of the Solar System and the emergence of life — 13.8 billion years of cosmic history condensed...

Turn any radio antenna to the sky and a tiny fraction of the static you receive is something extraordinary — the oldest light in the universe, the fad...

For about twenty minutes, the entire universe was a nuclear reactor. In that brief window, the fates of all hydrogen and helium in the cosmos were sea...