The world’s greatest clockmaker sent a clock to the new world, and everything went haywire. The reason why will shock you. For millennia, humanity’s one-and-only reliable way to keep time was […]

These three reasons are why there’s no getting around the fact that astronomy needs the James Webb Space Telescope. Even the most powerful telescope in history, the Hubble Space Telescope, […]

LIGO’s enormous arms contract and expand as gravitational waves pass through them. But, puzzlingly, so does the light within them. For the past three years, humanity has known a new kind […]

Shortly after the Big Bang, the Universe became completely dark. The first stars, when they ignited, changed everything. For perhaps 100 million years, the Universe was devoid of stars. The […]

An Oxford physicist tries to cast doubt on dark energy, but the data says otherwise. It was a mere 20 years ago that our picture of the Universe got a […]

Dark matter is our leading theory for a reason. New, detailed studies of the smallest galaxies could kill off the most studied alternative. When you look out at the Universe, […]

One of the most popular viral videos about space is dead wrong. But it gives us a chance to learn something incredible. There are a lot of moving parts to […]

Different measurements of the Universe’s rate of expansion give inconsistent results. But this simple solution could fix everything. In 1915, Einstein’s theory of General Relativity gave us a brand new […]

With every second that goes by, tens of thousands of star disappear from our reach. And it’s getting worse. It’s been nearly a century since scientists first theorized that the Universe […]

The Universe is an enormous place, but we can’t see all the way back to the beginning. Here’s the latest record-breaker. No matter how far back we look in the […]

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft taught us more than we ever imagined about Saturn. Could we do something similar for Uranus and Neptune? From where we are in the Solar System, looking out […]

Three great things all align this August, making the Perseids a can’t-miss show. Here’s how to take advantage. When it comes to meteor showers, we have these dazzling pictures in […]

It wasn’t just the Milky Way and Andromeda two billion years ago. Here in the Local Group, our two largest galaxies dominate: Andromeda and the Milky Way. Our Local Group of […]

Did the Universe begin at time t=0? Did space and time emerge from that? The Universe, today, is expanding and cooling, as the volume of the Universe increases while the number […]

A new set of images from NASA’s Chandra X-ray observatory shows us what we’ve never seen before. The Pillars of Creation, 7,000 light years away in the Eagle Nebula, represents one […]

Before there were gravitational waves, multi-messenger astronomy got its start with the neutrino. Sometimes, the best-designed experiments fail. The effect you’re looking for might not even occur, meaning that a […]

The brightest galaxies of all neither have the most stars nor the biggest black holes. Here’s how to solve the mystery. With some 400 billion stars burning steadily, the Milky Way […]

How ‘special’ are we for life to have survived and thrived the way it did? While there are hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy, many with Earth-sized planets at […]

Sedna could be the very first known object from the Inner Oort Cloud. But time is running out to create and launch a mission. In 2003, scientists discovered an object beyond […]

Even before we have the James Webb Space Telescope, a controversy over when the first stars formed is growing. As far back as our most powerful telescopes have ever looked, we’ve […]

The ingredients for life are everywhere, but so far the only life we know of comes from Earth. Here’s how that might change. Ever since human beings first turned our eyes […]

One of the night sky’s most famous sights isn’t what it appears to be. Perhaps the most famous sight of a dying star is the Ring Nebula, known since 1779. The […]