Cosmology

The Big Bang is often described as the explosive birth of the universe — a singular moment when space, time and matter sprang into existence. But what if this was not the beginning at all? What if our universe emerged from something else — something more familiar and radical at the same time?In a new…

Scientists have a pretty good idea of how our universe began: According to the Big Bang theory, an infinitely small, dense point rapidly expanded 13.8 billion years ago, and the universe has been experiencing accelerating expansion ever since. However, trying to imagine where our universe might go next, or even how and when it might…

The universe's largest structure, the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall, was already a challenge to explain with models of the universe due to its incredibly vast size — and now, using the most powerful blasts of energy in the universe, Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRBs), astronomers have discovered this structure is even bigger than they realized. Plus, the…

In 1929, astronomer Edwin Hubble published a paper demonstrating that the universe is expanding. It gave rise to the Hubble constant, the number that describes how fast the universe is expanding.But it eventually created a puzzle, called the Hubble tension, because this cosmic expansion differs depending on what cosmic objects are used to measure it.A…

The universe's missing matter may have finally been found.Astronomers think regular matter — that is, the stuff that isn't dark matter — makes up about 15% of the universe's total mass. However, for years, researchers have run into a problem when trying to quantify it: They haven't been able to find about half of that…

A pair of circling white dwarf stars located on our "cosmic doorstep" are doomed to explode in a rare, quadruple supernova that will shine 10 times brighter than the moon in the night sky, a new study suggests.However, this super-bright spectacle will not happen for about 23 billion years, meaning that humanity will not be…

Astronomers have released the clearest images yet of the infant universe — and they confirm that the leading theory of the universe's evolution accurately describes its early stages.The new images capture light that travelled for more than 13 billion years to reach the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) in Chile. They show the cosmos when it…

Astronomers have discovered a collection of tiny galaxies located roughly 3 million light-years away that includes the smallest and faintest galaxy ever seen.This galaxy, designated Andromeda XXXV, and its compatriots orbiting our neighbor galaxy, Andromeda, could change how we think about cosmic evolution.That's because dwarf galaxies this small should have been destroyed in the hotter…

Astronomers have released the clearest images yet of the infant universe — and they confirm that the leading theory of the universe's evolution accurately describes its early stages.The new images capture light that travelled for more than 13 billion years to reach the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) in Chile. They show the cosmos when it…

Deep observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have revealed an exceptionally large galaxy in the early universe. It's a cosmic giant whose light has travelled over 12 billion years to reach us. We've dubbed it the Big Wheel, with our findings published March 17 in Nature Astronomy.This giant disk galaxy existed within the…