The NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory, a major new scientific facility jointly funded by the US National Science Foundation ...

The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, a flagship astronomy and astrophysics project currently under construction on a mountaintop in Chile, will be named for astronomer Vera Rubin, a key figure in the ...

The Standard Model of particle physics is both fantastically successful and glaringly incomplete. Its predictions have pieced together many of the known features of the universe and guided physicists ...

The Standard Model is a thing of beauty. It is the most rigorous theory of particle physics, incredibly precise and accurate in its predictions. It mathematically lays out the 17 building blocks of ...

The particles we meet The radioactivity born inside your body is only a fraction of the radiation you naturally (and harmlessly) come in contact with on an everyday basis. The average American ...

Chasing hidden flavors Neutrinos are known to oscillate between three known types, or flavors, as they move through space: electron, muon and tau. But in 1995, physicists working on the Liquid ...

Next week, physicists will meet in Venice to discuss the future of European particle physics research. Early in his career, ...

The hidden neutrino As we experimentally observe them now, neutrinos cannot interact with the Higgs field because they’re are missing something vital: They are not right-handed. Particles can be ...

3. It all adds up to 85%. Amazingly, despite being unclear on precisely what dark matter is, astrophysicists do know pretty well how much of it there is—which is why we can say that it accounts for 85 ...

2. Gravity and weight are not the same thing. Astronauts on the space station float, and sometimes we lazily say they are in zero gravity. But that’s not true. The force of gravity on an astronaut is ...

Gamma rays are the most energetic type of light, packing a punch strong enough to pierce through metal or concrete barriers. More energetic than X-rays, they are born in the chaos of exploding stars, ...