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Astronomy
Scientists are notoriously resistant to new ideas. Are they falling prey to groupthink? Or are our current theories just that successful?
Found by Hubble before JWST's launch, GNz7q looked like a mix of a galaxy and a quasar. Was it actually our first known "little red dot"?
24mins
“Deep down the natural endpoint of this whole goal of looking for planets is to answer the question: are we alone?”
To learn how our Universe grew up, we have to look at large numbers of galaxies at all distances to find out. Good thing we have JWST!
Our Sun only arose after 9.2 billion years of cosmic history: with many stars living and dying first. How many prior generations were there?
Since the time of Galileo, Saturn's rings have remained an unexplained mystery. A new idea may have finally solved the longstanding puzzle.
By deeply imaging a large volume of space, COSMOS-Web provides JWST's widest cosmic views. Its gravitational lenses reveal a big surprise.
From here on Earth, looking farther away in space means looking farther back in time. So what are distant Earth-watchers seeing right now?
As October begins, thousands of longtime NASA employees are leaving the agency. 4000+ will exit by January 9, 2026, changing NASA forever.
If you think of the Big Bang as an explosion, we can trace it back to a single point-of-origin. But what if it happened everywhere at once?
Dust is ubiquitous in the modern Universe, appearing in nearly all galaxies. But our cosmos was born dust-free. So where does it originate?
Going back to 1990, we hadn't even found one planet outside of our Solar System. As we close in on 6000, we now see many of them directly.
As we look to larger cosmic scales, we get a broader view of the expansive cosmic forest, eventually revealing the grandest views of all.
10 years ago, LIGO saw its first gravitational wave. After 218 detections, our view of black holes has changed forever. Can this era endure?
Designed to map galaxies, the SPHEREx mission's first science result is instead about interstellar interloper 3I/ATLAS. No, it's not aliens.
In our own Milky Way, a recently deceased star creates a ghostly, hand-like shape in X-rays some 150 light-years wide. Here's how it's made.
1hr 26mins
“I like to say that physics is hard because physics is easy, by which I mean we actually think about physics as students.”
Across planet Earth, dark and pristine night skies are an increasingly rare resource. These photos showcase the best of what we still have.
At the end of July, hundreds of scientists convened to plan NASA's upcoming astrophysics flagship mission. Will the US allow it to happen?
On the largest scales, galaxies don't simply clump together, but form superclusters. Too bad they don't remain bound together.
When the Hubble Space Telescope first launched in 1990, there was so much we didn't know. Here's how far we've come.
With over 300 high-significance gravitational wave detections, we now have a huge unsolved puzzle. Will we invest in finding the solution?