We do not live inside of a black hole, but that does not rule out the possibility that our universe was born from one. Oddly, if you were to take all the matter contents of the universe and cram them ...

For nearly a century, modern cosmology has treated the Big Bang as the opening moment of everything, the instant when space, time, and energy burst into existence from an infinitely dense point. That ...

A cartoon of a black hole and a naked singularity. Either of them can be the end product of a gravita tional collapse of matter, depending on initial and other conditions. For a black hole, nothing, ...

What if the Big Bang didn't begin with a singularity? This point of infinite density, which so divides physicists, could be ...

How did the universe start? Did we begin with a big bang, or was there a bounce? Might the cosmos evolve in a cycle of expansion and collapse, over and over for all eternity? Now, in two papers, ...

Can we do away with the troublesome singularity at the heart of black holes? A new paper in JCAP reimagines these extreme objects in light of current knowledge. “Hic sunt leones,” remarks Stefano ...

We live in a golden age for learning about the universe. Our most powerful telescopes have revealed that the cosmos is surprisingly simple on the largest visible scales. Likewise, our most powerful ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Two blind spots torture physicists: the birth of the universe and the center of a black hole. The former may feel like a moment in time ...