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Cosmic Microwave Background
IceCube just found an active galaxy in the nearby Universe, 47 million light-years away, through its neutrino emissions: a cosmic first.
We know the Universe is expanding, but scientists don't agree on the rate. This is a legitimate problem.
The stars circle each other every 51 minutes, confirming a decades-old prediction.
Early relics and late-time objects give incompatible results for the expanding Universe. This independent anomaly intensifies the problem.
In the 20th century, many options abounded as to our cosmic origins. Today, only the Big Bang survives, thanks to this critical evidence.
As recently as 1990, we didn't know of any planets beyond our Solar System. Today, with 5000+, we're deep into the weeds of how they form.
Remembering Frank Drake, who transformed the search for alien life & extraterrestrial intelligence into a full-fledged scientific endeavor.
If your computer crashes, it might be due to a star that exploded somewhere in the Universe millions of years ago.
Our model of the Universe, dominated by dark matter and dark energy, explains almost everything we see. Almost. Here's what remains.
If you have an old TV set with the "rabbit ear" antennae, and you set it to channel 03, that snowy static can reveal the Big Bang itself.
Even though the leftover glow from the Big Bang creates a bath of radiation at only 2.725 K, some places in the Universe get even colder.
No matter how beautiful, elegant, or compelling your idea is, if it disagrees with observation and experiment, it's wrong.
Over time, the Universe becomes less dominated by dark matter and more dominated by dark energy. Is one transforming into the other?
Everything that gets heated up has to, somehow, radiate that energy away. Here's what we see when that happens in the Universe.
For some reason, the charges on the electron and proton are equal and opposite, and their numbers are equal, too. But why?
As far as we can tell, there's no limit to how far it goes on; only a limit to how far we can see. Could the Universe truly be infinite?
Empty, intergalactic space is just 2.725 K: not even three degrees above absolute zero. But the Boomerang Nebula is even colder.
As viewed by the MeerKAT telescope, this radio view of the Milky Way blows away every other way we've ever seen our home galaxy.
The Universe is supposed to be the same everywhere and in all directions. So what's that giant "cold spot" doing out there?
Hubble's deepest views of space revealed fewer than 10% of the Universe's galaxies. James Webb will change that forever.
We frequently say it's 2.725 K: from the light left over all the way from the Big Bang. But that's not all that's in the Universe.
The Solar System isn't a vortex, but rather the sum of all our great cosmic motions. Here's how we move through space.
We know it couldn't have began from a singularity. So how small could it have been at the absolute minimum?
After more than two decades of precision measurements, we've now reached the "gold standard" for how the pieces don't fit.
A few years ago, the first dark matter-free galaxies were announced, and then immediately disputed. Now, there are too many to ignore.
There are over 100 known elements in the periodic table. These 8 ways of making them account for every one.
It happened more than once, and needed to. Here’s why. If there’s one thing you can be certain about when it comes to outer space, it’s that it’s transparent, not opaque, […]
Galaxies can have regions both hotter and colder than the background radiation of the Universe. When we talk about the depths of space, we get this picture in our heads […]
And, if we have one, how close are we to it? No matter which direction we look in, or how far away our telescopes and instruments are capable of seeing, the […]