The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Amid the roilings of the Milky Way, immense pockets of gas coalesce into clouds where stars are born. In this process, there is a hidden ...

For observers on Earth, the sun appears as a bright, familiar disk—but what we see is only half the story. Like the moon, one ...

In the beginning, there was no magnetism. Immediately after the Big Bang, the universe contained an awesomely hot cloud of electrically charged protons, electrons, helium and lithium nuclei. Each ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. All the magnets you have ever interacted with, such as the tchotchkes stuck to your refrigerator door, are magnetic for the same reason.

I have a confession: I'm obsessed with magnets. We rely on magnets every day, but seldom give them a second thought. There are magnets in your credit card, your cellphone, your car, microwave oven and ...

Widespread magnetism dating from our solar system’s earliest beginnings some 4.57 billion years ago likely played a major role in creating orbital order out of chaos. But until now, magnetism’s role ...

Scientists are now proposing a novel approach to achieve greater memory density while producing less heat: by using an electric field instead of a current to turn magnetism on and off, thereby ...

Step into a world so tiny, it defies imagination -- the nanoscale. Picture a single strand of hair, now shrink it a million times. You've arrived. Here, atoms and molecules are the architects of ...

Muons might not behave as expected. But scientists can’t agree on what to expect. By taking stock of how the subatomic particles wobble in a magnetic field, physicists have pinned down a property of ...