How Heavy Is the Milky Way?
By combining data from the Hubble and Gaia space telescopes, an international team of astronomers has come up with the…
Physicists Propose Hunting for Signs of Dark Matter in Ancient Minerals
Physicists typically build large, complex experiments to hunt for dark matter particles coming from outer space, but…
What's at the Edge of the Universe?
It is a routine emotion in 2019 to urgently wish, four or five times in a day, to be launched not simply into space but…
New NASA Mission Will Look Back at Billions of Years of Cosmic History
A newly approved NASA mission, called SPHEREx, will use a space-based observatory to study the early conditions of the…
Astronomers Accidentally Discover a Hidden Galaxy Right Next Door
While inspecting a known globular cluster, a team of astronomers began to notice that some of its stars didn’t seem to…
Astronomers Just Detected a Mysterious Repeating Cosmic Radio Burst—Again
Canadian scientists have detected 13 new fast radio bursts, those mysterious, split-second, high-energy pulses that…
Expanding Universe Mystery Deepens
An important discrepancy in measurements of the universe’s acceleration has theorists wondering whether we’ve gotten…
Astronomers Have Stumbled Upon One of the Most Ancient Stars in the Universe
A tiny star located about 1,590 light-years from Earth could be as old as 13.53 billion years, making it one of the…
Hey, Did You Know Stephen Hawking Thought There Is No God?
In what would be somewhat of a revelation had the late theoretical physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking not been…
One Last Map of the Ancient Universe Revealed From Defunct Spacecraft's Data
The astronomers behind a universe-mapping satellite have released the project’s final set of processed data. What you…
Every Tiny Speck of Light in This Image Is a Galaxy
To help us grok the immensity of the cosmos, the European Space Agency has released a remarkable image of space in…
How Will Future Civilizations Survive the Accelerating Expansion of the Universe?
If you think we have problems now, just wait a few billion years, when the accelerating expansion of the Universe…
The Hungriest Black Hole Ever Detected Gobbles a Sun-Sized Star Every Two Days
Supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies can get absurdly huge, sometimes reaching masses billions of times…
Stephen Hawking's Final Paper Published
Stephen Hawking may have passed away in March, but his final work has now been published in a scientific journal.
This Single Image Profoundly Sums Up Einstein's Landmark Theory
You might think you have gravity pretty well figured out. If you drop a ball out of a window, a short time later it…
The Universe Is Not in Danger of Ending From a Higgs Boson Vacuum Bubble
There are few easier ways to get people to read your website than to scare them. That’s how we ended up with the media…
Scientists Used Galaxies as Magnifying Lenses to See Individual Stars Billions of Light-Years Away
When you look up into the night sky, you see lots of stars—but all of them are members of our own Milky Way galaxy.…
Holy Crap, This Galaxy Has No Dark Matter
From what scientists have gathered, galaxies are nearly synonymous with dark matter. They seem to be mostly dark matter…
This Supposed Dark Matter Evidence Won't Seem to Go Away
This past June, 500 pounds of a specially fabricated crystal buried in an Italian mountain seemed to glow just a little…
What You Need to Know About Stephen Hawking’s Final Physics Paper
Less than two weeks before his death on March 14, beloved cosmologist Stephen Hawking put the final touches on a…