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 MatterÂ
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…
Stephen Hawking Was Terrified of Climate Change
Stephen Hawking, renowned theoretical physicist and one of the brightest scientific minds of the last half century, died…
Could the Weirdness of Quantum Physics Produce a New Kind of Star?
It would be silly to think that scientists and astronomers have spotted all of the different kinds of weird things that…
Landmark Cosmic Observation Provides Tantalizing Hints of Dark Matter
Today, scientists announced that they’d seen evidence of a long-sought signal from the first stars. This slight change…
Scientists Discover Long-Sought Evidence of First Stars Forming
When you sweep across the FM radio band, you don’t always hear music—mostly, you hear static. Lots of this ambient…
Incredibly Detailed Image of Our Galaxy's Center Shows How Things Move Around a Black Hole
There’s a black hole called Sagittarius A* at the center of our galaxy. It has 4 million times the mass of the sun, but…
New Results Challenge Basic Ideas of Supermassive Black Holes
Galaxies have supermassive black holes at their centers—our Milky Way, for example, has its own 4-million-solar-mass…