We have a picture of how and when it will all come to an end. These three big ideas could still profoundly change how our cosmos evolves.

With several seemingly incompatible observations, cosmology faces many puzzles. Could early, supermassive stars be the unified solution?

In just its first 10 hours of observations, the Vera Rubin observatory discovered more than 2000 new asteroids. What else will it teach us?

Is the Universe's expansion rate 67 km/s/Mpc, 73 km/s/Mpc, or somewhere in between? The Hubble tension is real and not so easy to resolve.

Under extreme conditions, matter takes on properties that lead to remarkable, novel possibilities. Topological superconductors included.

Many of us look at black holes as cosmic vacuum cleaners: sucking in everything in their vicinity. But it turns out they don't suck at all.

The most common visual depictions of the history of the Universe show the Big Bang as a growing tube with an "ignition" point. Why is that?

Finding it at all was a happy accident. Examining it further may help unlock the secrets hiding within the earliest galaxies of all.

Neutrons can be stable when bound into an atomic nucleus, but free neutrons decay away in mere minutes. So how are neutron stars stable?

A spherical structure nearly one billion light-years wide has been spotted in the nearby Universe, dating all the way back to the Big Bang.

The biggest, brightest galaxies are the easiest to spot, but the tiniest ones teach us about how the Milky Way assembled and grew up!

Spiritual experiences can be explained in terms of a highly evolved brain. But they also can be extremely meaningful.

Archaeologists can learn how societies lived by studying what they left behind when they died. Astronomers are doing much the same thing.

The conservation of energy is one of the most fundamental laws governing our reality. But in the expanding Universe, that's just not true.

JWST has brought us more distant views of the early Universe than ever before. Is the Big Bang, and all of modern cosmology, in trouble?

For many years, some cosmologists embraced the idea of an eternal, steady state universe. But science triumphed over philosophical prejudice.

The secret ingredient is violence, and it just might indicate that "moonmoons" aren't as uncommon as most astronomers think.

Every proton contains three quarks: two up and one down. But charm quarks, heavier than the proton itself, have been found inside. How?

We know the Universe is expanding, but scientists don't agree on the rate. This is a legitimate problem.

Early relics and late-time objects give incompatible results for the expanding Universe. This independent anomaly intensifies the problem.

Unexpected images of galaxies from the James Webb Space Telescope do not disprove the Big Bang. There are other likelier explanations.

The key problem with the dark matter hypothesis is that nobody knows what form dark matter might take.

The way to understand the earliest moments of creation is to recreate those conditions and study them. Why would we stop now?

When we look out at the Universe, even with Hubble, we're only seeing the closest, biggest, brightest galaxies. Here's where the rest are.

Life is possible because of asymmetries, such as an imbalance between matter and antimatter and the "handedness" (chirality) of molecules.

From before the Big Bang to the present day, the Universe goes through many eras. Dark energy heralds the final one.

After more than two decades of precision measurements, we've now reached the "gold standard" for how the pieces don't fit.

Is the “big freeze” our inevitable fate, or can dark energy save us? When we look out at the Universe today, we see sources of light practically everywhere we look. In […]

All supernovae are not created equal. After a 14 year investigation, the brightest ones have a surprising explanation. In 2006, astronomers witnessed a supernova that defied conventional explanation. Typically, supernovae […]

Without this one ingredient, there wouldn’t be enough ‘glue’ to hold the Universe together. Of all the things in the Universe to be thankful for — the stars, planets, atoms, molecules, and […]