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Universe Expansion
The standard picture of our Universe is that it's dominated by dark matter and dark energy. But this alternative is also worth considering.
The properties of a ghostly particle called a neutrino are coming into focus.
On the largest of cosmic scales, the Universe is expanding. But it isn't all-or-nothing everywhere, as "collapse" is also part of the story.
There are many things that separate science from ideology, politics, philosophy, or religion. Follow these 10 commandments to get it right.
The last infant stars are finishing their formation inside these pillars of gas. The evaporation of those columns is almost complete.
3mins
“I study the mineral kingdom — and its secrets could lead us to alien life.”
Sure, there's less daylight during winter than summer, as your hemisphere is tilted away from the Sun. But darkness goes deeper than that.
Our thermodynamic arrow of time explains why the entropy of any isolated system always increases. But it can't explain what we perceive.
All telescopes are fundamentally limited in what they can see. JWST reveals more distant galaxies than Hubble, but still can't see them all.
7mins
“We could be wrong. But if we are right, it’s profoundly important.” Leading mineralogist Dr. Robert Hazen on the missing law of nature that could explain why life emerges.
John Templeton Foundation
There was a time where no starlight was visible throughout the entire cosmos. That time was short-lived: shorter than astronomers imagined.
Gravitational waves carry enormous amounts of energy, but spread out quickly once they leave the source. Could they ever create black holes?
Traveling back in time is a staple of science fiction movies. But according to Einstein, it's a physical possibility that's truly allowed.
The sharpest optical images, for now, come from the Hubble Space Telescope. A ground-based technique can make images over 100 times sharper.
From the coldest planets to spacecraft that have exited the Solar System, these little-known facts stump even many professional astronomers.
The Universe's history, from cosmic inflation to the Big Bang to the present, is known. But whether it's infinite or not is still a mystery.
Although the Big Bang occurred at an instant in time long ago, we still see the light from it. Will the evidence ever disappear completely?
Known as hypervelocity stars, we originally thought just one would be ejected every 100,000 years. The real number is much greater.
3mins
Nobel Prize winning physicist Frank Wilczek reflects on Einstein’s greatest contribution.
There are two different ways to measure the expansion rate of the Universe, and they don't agree. And no, new measurements don't help.
Is gravity weaker over distances of billions of light-years?
A new all-time record! JWST's discovery of JADES-GS-z14-0 pushes the earliest galaxy ever seen to just 290 million years after the Big Bang.
If you bring too much mass or energy together in one location, you'll inevitably create a black hole. So why didn't the Big Bang become one?
The Universe is precisely dated at 13.8 billion years old, but astronomers claim the Methuselah star is 14.5 billion years old. What gives?
It's 2024, and we still only know of the fundamental particles of the Standard Model: nothing more. But these 8 unanswered questions remain.
The expanding Universe, in many ways, is the ultimate out-of-equilibrium system. After enough time passes, will we eventually get there?
For nearly 25 years, we thought we knew how the Universe would end. Now, new measurements point to a profoundly different conclusion.
In ~7 billion years, our Sun will run out of fuel and die. So will every star, eventually. Here are the different fates they'll encounter.
The mutual distance between well-separated galaxies increases with time as the Universe expands. What else expands, and what doesn't?
The number of planets that could support life may be far greater than previously thought, a recent discovery suggests.