WHY was the big bang so very big? It has been a struggle to explain why the infant universe expanded so rapidly. But now Stephen Hawking at the University of Cambridge, and colleagues, think they are close to perfecting an answer - by treating the early cosmos as a quantum object with a multitude of alternative universes that gradually blend into ...

The universe began with a massive expansion, billions and billions of years ago, and it continues to expand with every passing second. The idea that the universe, and man's very existence, began with a ''Big Bang'' is no longer a topic of debate among most scientists--it is essentially taken as fact. How has man come to this ...

A new cyclic cosmological model demonstrates the universe can endlessly expand and contract, providing a rival to Big Bang theories and solving a thorny modern physics problem, according to University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill physicists....

The 2006 Nobel prize for physics has been awarded to John Mather and George Smoot for their contribution to the big bang theory of the origin of the universe. The pair were honored for their discovery of the blackbody form and anisotropy of the co...

Our universe may be 15% larger and older than we thought, according to new measurements of the distance to a nearby galaxy....