The prevailing understanding of the universe's origin, the Big Bang theory, has long held that our cosmos emerged from a state of emptiness and exploded into existence. However, groundbreaking discoveries are challenging this notion, revealing …
The universe is expanding, with every galaxy beyond the Local Group speeding away from us. Today, most of the universe's galaxies are already receding faster than the speed of light. All galaxies currently beyond 18 billion light-years are fore…
In 1917, just two years after Albert Einstein proposed the general theory of relativity — his revolutionary new theory of gravity — he took a bold step forward and decided to apply his theory to the Universe as a whole. His question was simple but …
For the first time, astronomers have caught a glimpse of shock waves rippling along strands of the cosmic web — the enormous tangle of galaxies, gas and dark matter that fills the observable universe. Top image: In this simulation of the cosmic …
Astronomers from the University of Texas and the University of Arizona have discovered a fast-growing black hole in one of the most extreme galaxies known at the edge of the Universe. The discovery of the galaxy and the black hole at its center …
Astronomers detected a radio signal from deeper in space than ever before, using a cosmic trick first predicted by Einstein. By using warped space-time as a magnifying glass, astronomers have picked up the most distant signal of its kind from …
It makes up most of the universe, yet hardly anything is known about the so-called Dark Energy that envelopes us. The unusual 'something' – one of the great mysteries of cosmology – is believed to be an unknown force that is pushing thin…
Scientists have made a precise map of all the matter in the universe. The new map represents one of the most precise measurements of how all the stuff in the universe is distributed across the universe. It mostly fits with our existing picture o…
MACS0647's immense gravity works as a cosmic lens, bending and magnifying light from the more distant MACS0647-JD system. It also triple-lensinged the JD system, causing its picture to appear in three different places. These photos are labelled…
Traveling above Jupiter at more than 130,000 miles per hour, NASA's $1 billion Juno probe took its ninth set of stunning flyby images. But the sun slipped between the giant planet and Earth for more than a week, blocking the spacecraft fr…
