Remember that time in the Lord of the Rings lore when the dwarves of Moria dug too greedily and too deep, unearthing the Balrog, an ancient horror not meant to roam free in the modern age? Cosmic ...

One of the strangest ideas about the nature of the universe could be one of the most important. Do long, thin, and incredibly dense strands of matter called cosmic strings wind their way throughout ...

Cosmic strings are artifacts of what the universe looked like in the moments before it rapidly changed from a high-energy to low-energy environment—the Big Bang. Today, scientists believe cosmic ...

Subtle aberrations in the clockwork blinking of stars could become “the result of the century.” That’s if the distortions are produced by a network of giant filaments left over from the birth of the ...

Cosmic strings are hypothesised one-dimensional topological defects formed during symmetry-breaking phase transitions in the early Universe. As these strings evolve, they intersect and form loops ...

Topology originated from the classification of geometric structures in mathematics, and have prevailed in a variety of branches of physics, ranging from the early electronic topological insulator to ...

Physicists in the US and Singapore are the first to use light from distant galaxies to perform a systematic search for cosmic strings — massive structures that may have been created just after the Big ...

Paul M. Sutter is an astrophysicist at The Ohio State University, host of Ask a Spaceman and "Space Radio," and author of "Your Place in the Universe." Sutter contributed this article to Space.com's ...