It was barely a century ago that we thought the Milky Way encompassed the entirety of the Universe. Now? We’re not even a special galaxy.
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Even from a single pixel, multiwavelength data taken over time can reveal clouds, icecaps, oceans, continents, and even signs of life.
We understand many things about our Universe, and our home within it, extremely well. The number of stars in the Milky Way isn’t among them.
Although the Big Bang occurred at an instant in time long ago, we still see the light from it. Will the evidence ever disappear completely?
By looking back at future dreams we can see our current hopes and visions in a whole new light.
Black holes are the most massive individual objects, spanning up to a light-day across. So how do they make jets that affect the cosmic web?
“I was stunned. Here in front of me was the original apparatus through which a new vision of the world was slowly and painfully brought to light.”
The closest known star that will soon undergo a core-collapse supernova is Betelgeuse, just 640 light-years away. Here’s what we’ll observe.
Many were hoping that JWST would find the first stars of all. Despite many hopeful claims, it hasn’t, and probably can’t. Here’s how we can.
With LEDs bringing brighter nighttime lighting than ever before, and thousands of new satellites polluting the skies, astronomy needs help.
From inside our Solar System, zodiacal light prevents us from seeing true darkness. From billions of miles away, New Horizons finally can.
Despite many ultra-distant galaxy candidates found with JWST, we still haven’t seen anything from the Universe’s first 250 million years.
The most iconic “dark nebula” of all lights up under JWST’s infrared gaze. Here’s what’s newly discovered inside.
A new measurement offers insights on the density of the mysterious force driving the Universe’s expansion.
Light can be turned into heat, which can then be turned into motion, and the effect of that motion can be turned into a big squeeze.
In 2017, a kilonova sent light and gravitational waves across the Universe. Here on Earth, there was a 1.7 second signal arrival delay. Why?
For hundreds of millions of years, a cosmic fog blocked all signs of starlight. At last, JWST found the galaxies that cleared that fog away.
Massive galaxy cluster Abell S1063, 4.5 billion light-years away, bends and distorts the space nearby. Here’s what a JWST deep field shows.
National Geographic’s first James Webb Space Telescope book shows us the cosmos like never before.
When we divide matter into its fundamental, indivisible components, are those particles truly point-like, or is there a finite minimum size?
Coming from just 280 million years after the Big Bang, or 98% of cosmic history ago, this new, massive galaxy is a puzzle, but not a mirage.
The Michelson-Morley experiment of 1887, despite expectations, revealed a null result: no effect. The implications were revolutionary.
The most famous Hubble images show glittering stars and galaxies amidst the black backdrop of space. But more was captured than we realized.
The most iconic, longest-lived space telescope of all, NASA’s Hubble, is experiencing orbital decay as the solar cycle peaks. Here’s why.
It’s not only the gravity from galaxies in a cluster that reveals dark matter, but the ejected, intracluster stars actually trace it out.
Recent research sheds light on how the brain overgeneralizes fear, causing people to be afraid of harmless situations.
All telescopes are fundamentally limited in what they can see. JWST reveals more distant galaxies than Hubble, but still can’t see them all.
Astronomers see spiral and elliptical nebulae nearly everywhere, except by the Milky Way’s plane. We didn’t know why until the 20th century.
A new SETI study shows how far the field of technosignatures has come.
The problem for galactic-scale civilizations comes down to two numbers.