No one knows–because neither the human eye or brain is equipped to see it. That’s where art comes in. There’s an invisible world that operates all around us, but we can’t see it. It’s a world composed ...

Why did they form at that time? Astronomers know from observing distant exploding stars that the size of the universe has ...

A pair of physicists announced the discovery of a subatomic event so powerful that the researchers wondered if it was too dangerous to make public. The explosive event? The duo showed that two tiny ...

The isotope lead-208 was predicted to be extremely stable and perfectly spherical because of the “magic” numbers of electrons and protons orbiting its nucleus. When researchers blasted lead-208 with ...

Having good neighbors can be very valuable—even in the atomic world. A team of Amsterdam physicists was able to determine an important property of strontium atoms, a highly useful element for modern ...

The stuff you scrape off burnt toast is made primarily of atoms of carbon. But what makes up a carbon atom—or any other atom? The first subatomic particle to be identified was the electron, in 1898.

When it comes to talent, versatility and the power to change the world, which atomic particle is the champ? Read what our four contenders have to say—then you decide. Physics fans, are you ready to ...

Elementary particles are the smallest known building blocks of the universe. They are thought to have no internal structure, meaning that researchers think about them as zero-dimensional points that ...

Physicists are drawing closer to answering a long-standing mystery of the Universe: how long a neutron lives. Neutrons are electrically neutral particles that usually combine with protons to make up ...

Wolfgang Pauli, the Austrian physicist who predicted the neutrino’s existence, also won a Nobel, but not for the neutrino (he did a lot of other very important stuff). He might have won for the ...

At Oak Ridge National Laboratory in eastern Tennessee, physicist Leah Broussard is trying to open a portal to a parallel universe. She calls it an “oscillation” that would lead her to “mirror matter,” ...