Could it be that the universe’s first structures were born not from enigmatic inflaton fields, but from the echoes of ancient gravitational waves? In a shocking shift from the conventional picture of ...

Every astronomy textbook tells us that soon after the Big Bang, there was a period of exponentially accelerating expansion called cosmic inflation. In a tiny fraction of a second, inflationary ...

Researchers have discovered a new generic production mechanism of gravitational waves generated by a phenomenon known as oscillons. Researchers have discovered a new generic production mechanism of ...

For a fraction of a second after the big bang occurred 13.8 billion years ago, most physicists believe, the newborn universe dramatically ballooned in size, jumping from being smaller than a proton to ...

TO COOK up planets, stars and people, the universe had to be preheated. In the first slivers of a second after the big bang, the universe expanded exponentially in a process called inflation, leaving ...