[deeths]

I'm glad that was helpful. I'm in a similar boat of just being interested in this for fun. I have a little more of the math and physics background for it, but it's pretty rusty and I don't need it to understand even most of the interesting papers.

You probably want to understand three areas in more detail than you'll get from the wikipedia links I sent: 1) cosmology (people gave several good recommendations already) 2) wrap your head around the weirdness of quantum physics. I really enjoyed Six Impossible Things by John Gribbin as a good intro to different equivalent ways of conceptualizing quantum physics. It's not heavy on math and you can do it as an audiobook without missing anything. 3) Standard Model of forces/particles. It's really helpful to do this as a part of a book or long article instead of just wikipedia. Some of the recommendations in #1 will cover this. I don't have any recent recommendations to give there, but I'm sure there's lots out there.

Here are few recent articles and papers that are good for jumping in to some recent news: Summary of all the detected gravitational events since gravity astronomy became possible: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2010.14533.pdf Here's an article on the above if the paper is too dense: https://www.quantamagazine.org/new-black-holes-offer-physici...

Puzzling out what changes in the brightness of Betelgeuse mean: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2002.10463.pdf

Another puzzle with changing star brightness: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1906.11268.pdf

And here's one that's helpful to get a sense of why proton/neutron physics is so complex and counterintuitive: https://www.quantamagazine.org/protons-antimatter-revealed-b...