Anish Ghoshal

In the first moments after the Big Bang, space boiled. A superheated substance permeating the world gave rise to giant bubbles of a new phase – much like a liquid produces vapor. Collisions of these bubbles accelerated particles to energies unimaginable in Earthly accelerators.

The mystery of dark matter, first glimpsed in the stellar whirlpools by Vera Rubin, has been tormenting physics for nearly a century. One of the boldest hypotheses: primordial black holes, born in the scalding broth of the early universe.

Two dots on the surface of a balloon: that's all the reference points you have when trying to figure out how it inflates. That's roughly how cosmologists reconstruct the history of the universe's expansion.