Space

Space

Because of dark energy, distant objects speed away from us faster and faster as time goes on. How long before every galaxy is out of reach?
Man in a suit posing with a vintage BBC Big Bang 75 microphone.
To Fred Hoyle, the Big Bang was nothing more than a creationist myth. 75 years later, it's cemented as the beginning of our Universe.
Fractal pattern with a stark contrast of vibrant orange and deep blue hues, designed to make the universe visible.
JWST has puzzled astronomers by revealing large, bright, massive early galaxies. But the littlest ones pack the greatest cosmic punch.
A laser beam is coming out of a large dome.
Tech designed to fuse atoms might be able to clean up space, too.
A diagram illustrating the earth's orbit around the sun with positions indicating seasonal change, including facts about leap day.
Leap day only comes once every four years, including in 2024. But the reason we have it, including when we do and don't, may surprise you.
A small piece of rock from Germany on a white surface.
Meanwhile meteorite hunters rushed to Berlin to find this most rare space rock.
A woman is working on a robot in a factory.
NASA gave three robots plans for a moon shelter, and the robots figured out how to build it.
An image of a fireball emerging from a dark background.
Until the Apollo missions, we had no idea how the moon got here, just a series of educated guesses. They rewrote the story of the moon’s origins.
nasa merge black hole
So far, gravitational waves have revealed stellar mass black holes and neutron stars, plus a cosmic background. So much more is coming.
An image of a spiral galaxy taken by the JWST in space.
Almost every large structure in the Universe displays a 5:1 dark matter-to-normal matter ratio. Here's how some galaxies defy that rule.
Einstein field equations
Although many of Einstein's papers revolutionized physics, there's one Einsteinian advance, generally, that towers over all the rest.
A cluster of galaxies with a star in the middle.
Beyond the planets, stars, and Milky Way lie ultra-distant objects: galaxies and quasars. Here's how far back we've seen throughout history.
An abstract composite image depicting where life began with mountainous terrain, chemical structures, and a monochrome inset of a cloudy sky.
Although early Earth was a molten hellscape, once it cooled, life arose almost immediately. That original chain of life remains unbroken.
A digitally enhanced view of a crescent planet Earth with a galaxy in the background.
The Earth that exists today wasn't formed simultaneously with the Sun and the other planets. In some ways, we're quite a latecomer.
A bright light in the sky.
As planets with too many volatiles and too little mass orbit their parent stars, their atmospheres photoevaporate, spelling doom for some.
A tunnel is being constructed in a tunnel.
The DUNE project will beam tiny neutrinos across vast distances. But the first step involved moving a heavier material: 1 million tons of rock.
Composition of the dark energy prominence universe showing percentages of dark energy, dark matter, and visible matter.
Early on, only matter and radiation were important for the expanding Universe. After a few billion years, dark energy changed everything.
Nasa's JWST captures spiral galaxies in a series of photos.
Stars are born, live, and die within the spiral arms of galaxies like the Milky Way. These 19 JWST spirals deliver unprecedented riches.
An image of a galaxy cluster.
If our Milky Way were located in the Virgo cluster instead of the Local Group, chances are we'd already be a "red and dead" galaxy.
A map of a cluster of stars illustrating star birth.
Here in our Solar System, we only have one star: a singlet. For many systems, including the highest-mass ones, that's anything but the norm.
A forest overlaid with an image of a city
The answer is set to change in the year 2113, a recent estimate suggests.
An image of a purple galaxy in space.
Observations of an enormous cosmic structure, dubbed the "Big Ring," seem to violate the Copernican principle.
An artist's rendering of two **changed** planets in space.
Our cosmic home, planet Earth, has been through a lot over the past 4.5 billion years. Here are some of its most spectacular changes
An image of a sphere with stars in it.
For every proton, there were over a billion others that annihilated away with an antimatter counterpart. So where did all that energy go?
supernova remnant star formation spitzer
One newly discovered, ancient star has a composition unlike any other. Explaining its existence is already blowing astronomers' minds.
An image of an e - ring in space.
Here's why the answer may forever elude scientists.
An artist's illustration of a supermassive black hole with an accretion disk and relativistic jets.
As early as we've been able to identify them, the youngest galaxies seem to have large supermassive black holes. Here's how they were made.
A stylized illustration of the timeline of the universe, depicting major events from the big bang through the cosmic dark ages to the modern era.
For 550 million years, neutral atoms blocked the light made in stars from traveling freely through the Universe. Here's how it then changed.
An image of colorful lights in the dark.
The first tests of optical communications far from Earth will take place aboard the asteroid-bound Psyche spacecraft
The ring nebula in space.
The Universe is an amazing place. Under the incredible, infrared gaze of JWST, it's coming into focus better than ever before.