Why Scientists Tried to Measure All of the Starlight That Ever Shone
Astronomers this week announced that they’d attempted to measure all of the starlight in the universe.
End of the Universe, Monsters of Climate Change, and Death: Best Gizmodo Stories of the Week
As we’re all essentially just killing time ahead of our inevitable death, Gizmodo this week explored death and deadly…
Trying to Understand the Size of This New Space Discovery Will Short-Circuit Your Brain
Light’s speed limit means that looking into the distance is the same as looking into the past: The farther incoming…
We Could Solve the Mysteries of Time and Space—If We Had a Particle Accelerator the Size of the Solar System
Gravity is incredibly weak. Just think: You can lift your foot despite the mass of the entire Earth pulling against it.…
Hubble Captures Image of a Truly Warped 'Dragon'
An ambitious use of the Hubble Space Telescope hopes to map some of the biggest, brightest, and furthest galaxies to…
Huge Patch of Universe Is Strangely Opaque Despite Its Lack of Galaxies
The mere fact that we live in a universe boggles my mind every once in a while. But thankfully, our cosmic home is a…
Can We Measure Our Own Galaxy Speeding Through Space?
You’re probably sitting still, right? Wrong, absolutely wrong. Not only are you on a spinning orb, but you’re also…
Hints of the First Stars Seen in 13-Billion-Year-Old Oxygen
Scientists have spotted 13-billion-year-old oxygen in a distant galaxy—a signal of stars forming during the universe’s…
What Shapes Are Things in Outer Space?
It’s an orgy of geometry, here on Earth. You got all kinds of shapes: Squares, trapezoids, even the occasional rhombus.…
Ultra-Cold Atoms Recreate the Expanding Universe in Tabletop Experiment
Eerie similarities unite vastly different scientific ideas in sometimes utterly surprising ways. One of these…
The Making of 'Pillars of Creation,' One of the Most Amazing Images of Our Universe
Pretty Scientific is a new Gizmodo series where we explore how the best images in science were created and why.
Scientists Make Enormous Map of the Early Universe to See What Our Galaxy Looked Like as a Baby
How do we find a tiny shred of self-understanding in this vast universe? More simply: how did we get here? A proper map…
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.…
Researchers Devise a New Way to Solve Long-Standing Mystery About the Universe
We know that the universe is expanding, but a strange discrepancy in just how fast that expansion is occurring…
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…
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…
Synchronized Galactic Orbit Challenges Our Best Theory of How the Universe Works
Scientists thought the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies were unique: They’ve got rings of smaller dwarf galaxies…
Multiverse Thought Experiment Suggests Life Could Still Exist Under Different Laws of Physics
Perhaps we’re not alone but instead reside in a multiverse stocked with all sorts of fantastical realms. These other…
Basic Assumptions of Physics Might Require the Future to Influence the Past
One of the most well-accepted physical theories makes no logical sense. Quantum mechanics, the theory that governs the…
What Was Our Universe Like Before the Big Bang?
Theoretical physicists and cosmologists deal with the biggest questions , like “Why are we here?” “When did the…