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Cosmology
The Firefly Sparkle galaxy was only spotted because of gravitational lensing's effects. Yet galaxies like these brought us a visible cosmos.
From a hot, dense, uniform state in its earliest moments, our entire known Universe arose. These unavoidable steps made it all possible.
50 years ago, Stephen Hawking showed that black holes emit radiation and eventually decay away. That fate may now apply to everything.
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.
One of the fundamental constants of nature, the fine-structure constant, determines so much about our Universe. Here's why it matters.
DESI has allowed astronomers to create an unprecedented 3D map of the Universe representing 20% of the entire sky.
For nearly 60 years, the hot Big Bang has been accepted as the best story of our cosmic origin. Could the Steady-State theory be possible?
Two parts of our Universe that seem to be unavoidable are dark matter and dark energy. Could they really be two aspects of the same thing?
"A person’s mass is made not of 'stuff' in the way we normally think about it, but rather our mass is made of energy."
Since the mid-1960s, the CMB has been identified with the Big Bang's leftover glow. Could any alternative explanations still work?
The most massive early galaxies grew up faster, and have more stars, than astronomers expected, according to JWST. What does it all mean?
The last naked-eye Milky Way supernova happened way back in 1604. With today's detectors, the next one could solve the dark matter mystery.
Since 1930, type Ia supernovae have been thought to arise from white dwarfs exceeding the Chandrasekhar mass limit. Here's why that's wrong.
The race to find dark matter could grow more complex with high-energy neutrino interference.
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?