Natalie Wolchover

When researchers reanalyzed the gold-standard data set of the early universe, they concluded that the cosmos must be “closed,” or curled up like a ball. Most others remain unconvinced.

The astronomers Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz won half of the prize for their 1995 discovery of a Jupiter-like planet orbiting a nearby star. The cosmologist James Peebles won the other half for work exploring the structure of the universe.

A new measurement appears to have eliminated an anomaly that had captivated physicists for nearly a decade.

At stake are fundamental ideas about how black holes form—and a six-way bet.

Although Einstein’s theory of space-time seems more complicated than Newtonian physics, it greatly simplified the mathematical description of the universe.

Opinions differ about what recent measurements of a sound-trapping fluid reveal about light-trapping black holes.

No new particles have been found at the Large Hadron Collider since the Higgs boson in 2012, but physicists say there’s much we can still learn from the Higgs itself.

Three researchers shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for advances in laser physics. The winners include a woman for the first time in 55 years.

A roundup of some of the most important discoveries gleaned so far from the Gaia space observatory’s new map of the galaxy.

The mother of all string theories passes a litmus test that, so far, no other candidate theory of quantum gravity has been able to match.