exotic matter

Since Saul Perlmutter and his colleagues discovered the accelerated expansion of the universe, physicists have been scratching their heads over the nature of dark energy.

At the heart of a warp drive lies Einstein's idea that massive bodies curve spacetime — the very stage on which all cosmic events unfold. Picture a bubble of such curved spacetime. Inside it, the ship floats without any G-forces, like a passenger in an airplane cabin who doesn't feel the headwind.

A wormhole is a hypothetical tunnel in curved spacetime connecting two distant regions of the universe and potentially shortening the journey between them.

A handful of sand weighing as much as a small mountain: that's roughly what strangelets are like: tiny clumps of 'strange' quark matter where particles are squeezed to unimaginable densities. In a new study, astrophysicists tested whether such objects could exist in nature and what they would look like.

A wormhole is a tunnel through the fabric of spacetime, an idea expanded by John Wheeler and Kip Thorne. Just as a mountain passage tends to cave in, the throat of a wormhole wants to snap shut.

Until now, dark energy has been studied like a car engine — only by the acceleration the Universe's expansion gains.

Short gamma-ray bursts are colossal explosions that release, in a fraction of a second, energy comparable to what our Sun will emit over billions of years.