Universe

New simulations suggest that habitable worlds could have begun forming only 200 million years after the big bang

A nearly century-old offshoot of Einstein’s general theory of relativity may hold promise for solving the mysteries of dark matter, dark energy and more

It’s neither fast nor food, but a spectacular object called HH 30 looks appetizing for astronomers in a new image from the James Webb Space Telescope

Strange x-ray pulses hint at a surprisingly long-lived white dwarf orbiting precariously close to a supermassive black hole

According to a tenet scientists call the cosmological principle, our place in space is in no way exceptional. But recent observations could overturn this long-held assumption

The celestial equivalent to latitude and longitude lets astronomers find their way across the heavens

The universe’s light-starved early epochs, as well as the first stars and galaxies, lie beyond the reach of conventional observatories but could be revealed by a new generation of radio telescope arrays

Barnard 68 is often mistaken for a hole in space, but it’s actually a dense, opaque cloud of dust—for now

Odds are that we’re not truly alone in the cosmos. But practically speaking, we might as well be

The nearby star Vega, featured in the 1997 movie Contact, appears to have a smooth disk devoid of giant planets for reasons we can’t explain

In 1974 we beamed a radio transmission into space that changed the way we think about our place in the cosmos

Finding a perfect sphere is actually pretty difficult