Big Bang

Scientists haven’t tested the Big Bang’s light for a revealing shift in 25 years. A new experiment aims to change that.

No definitive evidence for cosmic inflation is found, but support remains strong for the theory even as critics highlight its shortcomings as an explanation for how and why the universe began.

Early in cosmic history, our universe may have bumped into another — a primordial clash that could have left traces in the Big Bang’s afterglow.

Testing the multiverse hypothesis requires measuring whether our universe is statistically typical among the infinite variety of universes. But infinity does a number on statistics.

Cosmic dust in the high latitudes of the Milky Way could account for the entire swirl pattern that had been presented as proof of a leading Big Bang theory, according to a new data analysis from the Planck satellite.

The cosmologist David Spergel explains why a widely publicized gravitational-wave discovery could be wrong, and how the “overreaching” study could affect the public’s perception of science.

Chao-Lin Kuo, who helped design the experiment that claimed to have found evidence of gravitational waves from the Big Bang, isn’t bothered by criticism that cosmic dust may account for his results.

Scientists report the possible discovery of primordial gravitational waves, ripples in space-time that carry a record of how the universe began.

With a new approach that treats the universe as a fluid, cosmologists plan to tease out the fine details of the Big Bang from its behavior and evolution.