There’s more light than we can account for, and we’ve just measured it robustly for the first time. When we look out at the darkest night skies available on Earth, even […]
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And, at some point, did the Milky Way lose ours? There are some 400 billion objects flying through the Milky Way galaxy with enough mass that — if they were all made of […]
Aliens symbolize the best and worst of humanity. When we dream of aliens, we are pondering our future selves.
Humans are more likely to have “first contact” with an advanced alien civilization, according to a recent NASA-funded paper.
When you look at the Universe in an entirely new way, you sometimes find what you could never have anticipated. Almost exactly one year ago today, the Event Horizon Telescope […]
A gigantic star makes off during an eight-year gap in observations.
Black holes are the darkest objects of all. But are they made of dark matter? When it comes to the Universe, few objects are more compelling, fascinating, or extreme than black […]
The Twin Jet nebula, shown here, is a stunning example of a bipolar preplanetary nebula. At the center, a dying star is in the final stages of life where it […]
If we succeed in contacting them, will that seal humanity’s doom? One of the most wondrous questions of all concerns our place in the Universe. After 13.8 billion years of […]
How slight differences could have forever changed our cosmic history. 13.8 billion years ago, what we know today as our Universe began with the hot Big Bang. Filled with matter, antimatter […]
A new study explains how a chaotic region just outside a black hole’s event horizon might provide a virtually endless supply of energy.
Over the past 30 years, we’ve revolutionized what we know about the Universe. But we couldn’t have done it without these lessons. On April 24, 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope rocketed […]
There was a time in the Universe before we formed stars. Here’s how we’re exploring it. When we look out at the Universe today, we see that it’s full of […]
This mystery comes in two varieties: repeating and non-repeating. Here’s what we know so far. Imagine that you were looking out at the distant Universe, watching the stars, galaxies, and the […]
Thou shalt not conclude “aliens” from insufficient data. When it comes to what’s out there in this Universe, perhaps the only thing that’s greater than our cosmic ignorance is the […]
In both visible light and infrared, we get a preview of the spectacular advances that await the James Webb Space Telescope. What astronomers see isn’t just determined by the telescope […]
A colliding star may have triggered the drastic transformation.
If you think of the Big Bang as an explosion, we can trace it back to a single point-of-origin. But what if it happened everywhere at once?
The images and our best computer models don’t agree.
In 2006, the IAU demoted Pluto. Here’s what we know today. In 2006, the last planet in our Solar System suffered an unforgettable insult, as Pluto — known for generations as our ninth […]
A generation ago, NASA launched their great observatories to explore the Universe. It’s time for round 2. Throughout the history of astronomy, every advance we’ve ever made has come about because […]
When searching for extraterrestrial life, astronomers may want to look at planets with hydrogen-rich atmospheres.
We just found a system that we can’t explain. Here’s what’s going on. One of the most fascinating facts about the Universe is that there’s so much of it out there. […]
With 5,000 square degrees of data, the Dark Energy Survey has something important to say. For as long as humans have been studying the Universe, we’ve yearned to know the answers […]
And Dr. Jill Tarter never once lost her composure.
Its record-holding galaxy is 32 billion light-years away, in a Universe that’s only 13.8 billion years old. On April 24, 2020, humanity celebrates the 30th anniversary of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. […]
Without a little help from Einstein, we couldn’t have made this discovery. NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, currently celebrating its 30th anniversary, still churns out novel discoveries. The Hubble eXtreme Deep […]
Maybe 100% of stars don’t have planets, after all. When stars form in the Universe, they’re created in giant bursts. A stellar nursery in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy […]
Out of all the galaxies we know, only a few little ones are missing dark matter. At last, we finally understand why.