What Is Space-Time? Breaking Down Einstein's Big Idea

Oftentimes, we think of space as an endless, mostly empty vacuum, a silent backdrop where planets, stars, and galaxies play out their dance. We also think of time as something separate, a steady ticking that carries us from one moment to another, from past to the present, and into the future. 

However, modern physics demonstrates that these two ideas are not so easily kept separate from each other. In fact, space and time are woven into a single fabric: space-time. Albert Einstein's special relativity revealed that space and time adjust themselves depending on how you move.

Space-time is not just a backdrop where celestial objects are the main players. It's real, dynamic, and it shapes our universe. Imagine it as an invisible construction that holds everything in place. It guides how objects in the universe move and how the events unfold.

Without space-time, one could not talk about where or when. Let's explore how Einstein's ideas reshaped our understanding of reality and why they remain some of the most profound ideas in science.

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A Cosmic Void May Be Skewing Our Understanding of the Universe

“You can journey to the ends of the earth in search of success,” 19th-century Baptist preacher Russell Conwell is said to have proclaimed, “but if you’re lucky, you will discover happiness in your own backyard.”


Modern cosmology has stepped far beyond our cosmic backyard. We peer into the light from the earliest moments of the big bang. Our surveys stride across the universe, swallowing millions of galaxies at a time. We have mapped and measured the most subtle accelerations of cosmic expansion.

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A New Theory of the Universe’s Origins Without Inflation

How exactly did the universe start and how did these processes determine its formation and evolution? 

This is what a recent study published in Physical Review Research hopes to address as a team of researchers from Spain and Italy proposed a new model for the events that transpired immediately after the birth of the universe. 

This study has the potential to challenge longstanding theories regarding the exact processes that occurred at the beginning of the universe, along with how these processes have governed the formation and evolution of the universe.

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NASA’s Webb Telescope Discovers 300 Mysterious Objects That Shouldn’t Exist

In a recent study, researchers from the University of Missouri examined distant regions of the universe and made a surprising discovery. By analyzing infrared images captured by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), they detected 300 objects shining more brightly than expected.

“These mysterious objects are candidate galaxies in the early universe, meaning they could be very early galaxies,” said Haojing Yan, an astronomy professor in Mizzou’s College of Arts and Science and co-author on the study. 

“If even a few of these objects turn out to be what we think they are, our discovery could challenge current ideas about how galaxies formed in the early universe — the period when the first stars and galaxies began to take shape.”

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JWST discovers how we’re able to see the Universe at all

One of JWST’s main science goals was to teach us how the Universe grew up to be the way it is today, and one important cosmic mystery to solve was how the Universe came to be transparent to starlight. 

Previous studies had shown that the most prominent early JWST galaxies, the big, bright, massive ones, were too rare and too few in number to create enough ultraviolet photons to be responsible.

But a new study, highlighting many gravitationally lensed early, low-mass, but rapidly star-forming galaxies, measured their abundance exquisitely. We’ve found, at last, the main culprit behind cosmic reionization.

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New Theory Suggests Dark Matter Is Frozen Relics of Light-Speed Particles

In an ongoing quest to guess the secret behind the Universe's excess in gravity, two researchers from Dartmouth College in the US have proposed a chilling union between massless particles soon after the Big Bang.


For the better part of a century it's been frustratingly clear that estimates of the Universe's visible mass have failed to account for the way galaxies rotate, pointing to slow-moving clumps of matter we can't see. This stuff has been dubbed ' dark matter'.


Even as researchers whittle away at the list of properties describing this cold and silent corner of physics, its identity and origins remain elusive.

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Gravity is Result of Computational Process within Our Universe, Physicist Says

 University of Portsmouth physicist Melvin Vopson proposes a new way to think about gravity — not just as a pull, but as something that happens when the Universe is trying to stay organized.

This artist’s impression shows the evolution of the Universe beginning with the Big Bang on the left followed by the appearance of the Cosmic Microwave Background. The formation of the first stars ends the cosmic dark ages, followed by the formation of galaxies. Image credit: M. Weiss / Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

The possibility that the entire Universe is informational in nature and resembles a computational process is a popular theory among a number of well-known figures.

The thinking comes from within a branch of science known as information physics, which suggests physical reality is actually made up of structured information.

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The universe has different time zones

This supernova remnant that's about 16,000 light years from Earth is from a particular class of supernovae called type Ia that astronomers use to measure cosmic distances. (University of Texas/Chandra X-ray Observatory/NASA)

There's a cosmic controversy brewing in the universe. It centers around the mysterious force known as "dark energy."

This concept emerged from observations of distant supernovae that, in the late 1990s, seemed to indicate the universe had been expanding at a faster and faster pace ever since the big bang. Astronomers made these observations from a certain type of supernovae that explode in such a way that allows astronomers to calculate their distance from us.

The picture emerging from that data didn't fit with previous explanations of the universe that theorized its expansion, driven by the big bang, would eventually slow down as gravity took over. This led scientists to come up with the idea that a force they called "dark energy" pushed against gravity to make the universe expand faster and faster, in keeping with the supernovae data.     READ MORE...

Largest Structure in the Universe

Is it possible to understand the universe without understanding the largest structures that reside in it? In principle, not likely. In practical terms? Definitely not. Extremely large objects can distort our understanding of the cosmos.


Astronomers have found the largest structure in the universe so far, named Quipu after an Incan measuring system. It contains a shocking 200 quadrillion solar masses.


Astronomy is an endeavor where extremely large numbers are a part of daily discourse. But even in astronomy, 200 quadrillion is a number so large it's rarely encountered. And if Quipu's extremely large mass doesn't garner attention, its size surely does. 

The object, called a superstructure, is more than 400 megaparsecs long. That's more than 1.3 billion light-years.     READ MORE...

Dark Matter and Gravity

Key Takeaways

1. Out there in the Universe, it isn’t just normal matter that’s present, but dark matter as well: a mysterious, invisible substance that, as far as we can tell, gravitates, but doesn’t interact through any other means.
2. When we look at the gravitational effects that massive objects have on space, we find dark matter forms a diffuse, halo-and-filament-like network of structure.
3. Normal matter, however, collapses into stars, galaxies, planets, and much more. If dark matter gravitates, and does so the same as normal matter does, then what prevents it from collapsing?

Here in our Universe, it may be the normal matter that we can directly detect, measure, manipulate, experiment with, and observe, but it’s the dark matter that represents most of the mass in the Universe. 

Whereas all the “stuff” that the planets, stars, gas, plasma, and dust are composed of represents about 4.9% of the total energy in the Universe, the mysterious dark matter — whose nature is unknown but for which the observational astrophysical evidence is overwhelming — makes up a whopping 27% of the cosmic energy budget. 

Only dark energy, making up 68% of the Universe, is more important from an energy density perspective.     READ MORE...

New Structure Discovered

Largest Structure In The 

Near Universe Discovered 

130,000 Times More 

Massive Than Our Galaxy

James Webb Space Telescope Validates Expansion

Through the lens of the Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes, scientists are zeroing in on the Hubble Constant, a vital measure that indicates the universe’s expansion rate.

Recent studies, especially those involving the JWST, have provided more precise measurements, crucial for understanding the universe’s broader properties.

Understanding the Hubble Constant
In recent years, we’ve witnessed incredible advancements in our understanding of the universe, thanks to the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and its successor, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Both telescopes have revolutionized astronomy, uncovering stunning discoveries. 

Among their shared focus has been refining the Hubble Constant, a key measurement that links the speed at which distant galaxies are moving away with their distances. A recent study confirms that JWST has validated earlier findings from HST, providing more precision in this critical measurement.     READ MORE...

Webb Telescope Confirms: Universe is Expanding

WASHINGTON, Dec 9 (Reuters) - Fresh corroboration of the perplexing observation that the universe is expanding more rapidly than expected has scientists pondering the cause - perhaps some unknown factor involving the mysterious cosmic components dark energy and dark matter.

Two years of data from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope have now validated the Hubble Space Telescope's earlier finding that the rate of the universe's expansion is faster - by about 8% - than would be expected based on what astrophysicists know of the initial conditions in the cosmos and its evolution over billions of years. The discrepancy is called the Hubble Tension.  READ MORE...

NASA: We Were Incorrect About the Universe

For decades, scientists have been grappling with what is considered to be the most fundamental question about the cosmos: How fast is our universe expanding?

The rate of expansion influences everything from how galaxies form to how they might one day drift apart.

Determining the expansion rate of the universe, a number called the “Hubble constant,” shapes our entire understanding of the cosmos, its age, and its ultimate fate.

“Hubble tension” expansion conundrum
Unfortunately, though many brilliant minds have dedicated their lives to finding the answer to this riddle, all who have tried thus far have failed, running repeatedly into a brick wall that has come to be known as the “Hubble tension.”

Adam Riess, a physicist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, has been at the forefront of this debate. “With measurement errors negated, what remains is the real and exciting possibility that we have misunderstood the universe,” Riess admitted.     READ MORE...

Largest Universe Simulation EVER

The world’s largest simulation of the cosmos lays a new computational foundation for simultaneous extreme-scale dark matter and astrophysical investigations.

Researchers used the Frontier supercomputer to conduct the largest astrophysical simulation to date, simulating both atomic and dark matter across universe-sized scales. This was facilitated by advancements in HACC, a code developed to run on exascale-class supercomputers, now capable of performing quintillion calculations per second. 

This breakthrough in cosmological hydrodynamics simulations will aid in matching observational data with theoretical models.

Universe Simulation Breakthrough

The universe just expanded—at least in the realm of computer simulations.

Earlier this month, researchers at the Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory harnessed the power of the world’s fastest supercomputer to execute the largest astrophysical simulation of the universe ever achieved.   READ MORE...

An Anti-Universe Twin

Our universe has an anti-universe twin moving backwards in time, study finds

Seconds after the Big Bang, the Universe exhibited an astonishing simplicity. Observations reveal a spatially flat, radiation-dominated cosmos described by a Friedmann–Robertson–Walker (FRW) metric. This early state included small, Gaussian, and nearly scale-invariant scalar perturbations.

However, there is no evidence for primordial vector or tensor perturbations, nor for cosmic defects. These observations align with the prevailing inflationary model, which suggests that an era of rapid expansion preceded the Universe's observable state.


Despite its utility, inflation theory introduces complexities and arbitrary parameters, which many physicists view as unnecessary. A team led by Neil Turok and Latham Boyle challenges this conventional framework, offering an alternative grounded in the symmetry of the Universe itself.         READ MORE...

Our Universe is OLDER Than Originally Believed

In a groundbreaking discovery, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has presented data that directly challenges our current understanding of the universe. For years, cosmologists have pegged the universe's age at approximately 13.8 billion years. Yet, the new JWST findings suggest that this may be a vast underestimation. But how has one telescope managed to disrupt such a long-held belief?


The universe's secrets are vast, but none has been as puzzling as the presence of 'impossible early galaxies'—so named due to their peculiar formation periods.


According to existing models, these galaxies, emerging during the cosmic dawn, roughly 500 to 800 million years post-big bang, shouldn't have evolved disks and bulges so quickly. "It's akin to seeing a toddler with the wisdom of an octogenarian," says a scientist, explaining the paradox.     READ MORE...

Our Universe's Beginning

One of the biggest and also the toughest questions in modern astronomy is the origins of the universe. How did it come into existence? How did it evolve into what we know today? Though there’s still a lot that scientists don’t know, they do have a general idea of how energy, matter, stars, and galaxies were formed.

When trying to find answers for the origins of the universe, we need to look at the bigger picture — that is, how scientists view the early moments, minutes, years, or millions of years of the world we see today. Until relatively recently, this topic was largely approached from a religious perspective. Even when scientific observations didn’t align with biblical accounts of creation, scientists were hesitant to formulate their own theories.

In the first half of the 20th century, physicists and astronomers fiercely debated the idea that there was no true “beginning” to the universe — that it had always existed. While this assumption hasn’t been definitively disproven, it has since become more of a fringe theory.

Instead, science presents a completely different picture of the universe’s birth and early evolution, and we’re eager to explore it with you.     READ MORE...

Dark Matter Does Not Exist

For centuries, scientists have grappled with the fundamental forces that govern our universe, chief among them being gravity, and more recently, dark matter.

Gravity is the invisible force that attracts objects with mass towards each other, playing a crucial role in shaping the cosmos, from the formation of galaxies to the orbits of planets.

However, as our understanding of the universe has expanded, so too have the mysteries surrounding it.

Dark matter dilemma
One of the most perplexing of these mysteries is the concept of dark matter, a hypothetical form of matter that is believed to make up a significant portion of the universe’s total mass.

Unlike ordinary matter, which we can see and interact with directly, dark matter does not emit, absorb, or reflect light, making it invisible to telescopes and other detecting instruments.  READ MORE...

Galaxy with Impossible Light Signature

This region of space, viewed first iconically by Hubble and later by JWST, shows an animation that switches between the two. Both images still have fundamental limitations, as they were acquired from within our inner Solar System, where the presence of zodiacal light influences the noise floor of our instruments and cannot easily be removed. The extra presence of point-like red objects in JWST images, also known as “little red dots,” has finally been explained, but other puzzles still remain.






Since its launch in December of 2021, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has spotted record-setting objects all across the Universe, including at the greatest distances ever seen.

Many distant galaxies are energetic and show signatures of emission lines from specific atoms and molecules, particularly hydrogen. However, the Lyman-α line has never been seen earlier than 550 million years after the Big Bang.

Until now. With the discovery and spectroscopic follow-up on galaxy JADES-GS-z13-1-LA, we now have strong evidence for that emission line from a galaxy just 326 million years after the Big Bang. The question is: how?              READ MORE...