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Cosmology
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?
Humans, when we consider space travel, recognize the need for gravity. Without our planet, is artificial or antigravity even possible?
Why hasn’t matter fallen apart over billions of years? The mystery might start with protons.
The 5th brightest star in our night sky is young, blue, and apparently devoid of massive planets. New JWST observations deepen the mystery.
In the year 1181, a "guest star" was recorded in the constellation of Cassiopeia. Its modern supernova remnant is weirder than we imagined.
Almost everyone asserts that the Big Bang was the beginning of everything, followed by inflation. Has everyone gotten the order wrong?
More than two years after JWST began science operations, our Universe now looks very different. Here are its biggest science contributions.
The fabric of spacetime is four-dimensional, with three for space and only one for time. But wow, time sure is different from space!
An in-depth interview with astronomer Kelsey Johnson, whose new book, Into the Unknown, explores what remains unknown about the Universe.
The Universe changes remarkably over time, with some entities surviving and others simply decaying away. Is this cosmic evolution at work?
National Geographic's first James Webb Space Telescope book shows us the cosmos like never before.
The earliest Milky Way-like galaxy, REBELS-25, was spotted rotating about its axis. It's only 700 million years old: 5% of our present age.
Today, the deepest depths of intergalactic space aren't at absolute zero, but at a chill 2.73 K. How does that temperature change over time?
The Universe has been creating stars for nearly all 13.8 billion years of its history. But those photons can't match the Big Bang's light.
In theory, dark matter is cold, collisionless, and only interacts via gravity. What we see in ultra-diffuse galaxies indicates otherwise.
In all directions, at great distances, the Universe looks younger, more uniform, and less evolved. Does that mean Earth must be the center?
Despite many ultra-distant galaxy candidates found with JWST, we still haven't seen anything from the Universe's first 250 million years.
It's possible to remove all forms of matter, radiation, and curvature from space. When you do, dark energy still remains. Is this mandatory?
With the discovery of Porphyrion, we've now seen black hole jets spanning 24 million light-years: the scale of the cosmic web.
Within our observable Universe, there's only one Earth and one "you." But in a vast multiverse, so much more becomes possible.
A recent experiment challenges the leading dark matter theory and hints at new directions for uncovering one of the Universe's biggest mysteries.
Most fundamental constants could be a little larger or smaller, and our Universe would still be similar. But not the mass of the electron.
In the expanding Universe, different ways of measuring its rate give incompatible answers. Nobel Laureate Adam Riess explains what it means.
The Lyman-α emission line has never been seen earlier than 550 million years after the Big Bang. So why does JADES-GS-z13-1-LA have one?
Although a great many unidentified sights have been seen in the skies, none have conclusively demonstrated the presence of aliens. So far.
Taught in every introductory physics class for centuries, the parabola is only an imperfect approximation for the true path of a projectile.
Inflation, dark matter, and string theory are all proposed extensions to the prior consensus picture. But what does the evidence say?
The observation that everything we know is made out of matter and not antimatter is one of nature's greatest puzzles. Will we ever solve it?
The mass that gravitates and the mass that resists motion are, somehow, the same mass. But even Einstein didn't know why this is so.
Scientific surprises, driven by experiment, are often how science advances. But more often than not, they’re just bad science.