Chris Lintott

It is very difficult​ to describe what I witnessed on Monday, 8 April, standing in a field in Ohio a little after three in the afternoon. As the shadow of the Moon swept across the surrounding cornfields, engulfing the crowd that had gathered to watch the total solar eclipse, we were transported, briefly, to a place unlike anywhere else on Earth. The transition from partial to total eclipse...

Where​ the Earth and the other rocky planets of the solar system orbit today, there were once, five billion years ago, more than twenty worlds larger than the Moon, several perhaps as large as Mars. Collisions were common. Rocks brought back from the Moon by the Apollo astronauts tell us that one of these worlds, often known as Theia, hit the still-forming Earth, destroying itself and...

The universe​ was born in light. If modern cosmology is right, for the first forty thousand years or so after the Big Bang the most important component in the young, hot universe was electromagnetic radiation, a situation that continued until the universe had cooled sufficiently for the first hydrogen and helium atoms to form. Temperatures were still high enough at that point for the cosmos...