A little less than one-third of the universe—around 31 percent—consists of matter. A new calculation confirms that number; astrophysicists have long believed that something other than tangible stuff makes up the majority of our reality. So then, what is matter ...

Traversing through the dark, underground areas of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, Switzerland isn’t for the faint of heart. The world’s most powerful particle accelerator violently smashes protons and other subatomic particles together at nearly the speed of ...

If you think of a particle accelerator, what may come to mind is something like CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC): a multibillion-dollar colossus that’s dozens of miles wide and crosses international borders in the name of unlocking how the universe ...

Albert Einstein didn’t know about the existence of antimatter when he came up with the theory of general relativity, which has governed our understanding of gravity ever since. More than a century later, scientists are still debating how gravity affects ...

Trillions of particles from distant stars and galaxies are streaming through your body every second—you just can’t feel them. These ghost-like particles are called neutrinos. Although the universe spits them out constantly, these objects barely interact with matter—they can even ...

One of the world’s most powerful lasers can soon begin peering deeper into the atomic world thanks to recent, cutting-edge X-ray upgrades. Stanford’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory has announced improvements to the X-ray free-electron laser (XFEL) component of the Linac ...

One of the biggest questions in particle physics is whether the field itself tells an incomplete picture of the universe. At Fermilab, a US Department of Energy facility in suburban Chicago, particle physicists are trying to resolve this identity crisis. ...

The path to fusion power is getting a $150 million boost thanks to a partnership between Colorado State University and private laser energy company, Marvel Fusion. Announced on Monday, the new facility will be located on the CSU Foothills Campus, ...

It’s an exhilarating and sobering thought: All the planets, galaxies, starlight, and other objects that we can see and measure in the universe make up just 5 percent of existence. The other 95 percent are eaten up by two enigmas, ...

Neutrinos fill the universe, but you wouldn’t know that with your eyes. These subatomic particles are small—so small that physicists once thought they had no mass at all—and they have no electric charge. Even though trillions of neutrinos enter your ...