See also stories tagged with Cosmology
For the past 30 years, NASA's Great Observatories—the Hubble, Spitzer, Compton, and Chandra space telescopes—have revealed some amazing things about the universe. In addition to some of the deepest views of the universe provided ...
It was a good year for space science as Sumner Starrfield, an astronomer at Arizona State University, described what was to appear as a huge star exploding in the night sky, in a once-in-a-lifetime event this past fall. A ...
Astronomers have known for a century that the universe is expanding. We can now trace this expansion over much of its almost 14 billion year history, with important constraints going back to just one second after the Big ...
As physicists continue their struggle to find and explain the origin of dark matter, the approximately 80% of the matter in the universe that we can't see and so far haven't been able to detect, researchers have now proposed ...
When Albert Einstein introduced his theory of general relativity in 1915, it changed the way we viewed the universe. His gravitational model showed how Newtonian gravity, which had dominated astronomy and physics for more ...
The universe just got a whole lot bigger—or at least in the world of computer simulations, that is. In early November, researchers at the Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory used the fastest supercomputer on ...
Physicists have long grappled with the question of why the universe was able to support the evolution of intelligent life. The values of the many forces and particles, represented by some 30 so-called fundamental constants, ...
Gravity has shaped our cosmos. Its attractive influence turned tiny differences in the amount of matter present in the early universe into the sprawling strands of galaxies we see today. A new study using data from the Dark ...
Roughly 400,000 years after the Big Bang, the universe cooled just enough to allow photons to escape from the primordial cosmological soup. Over the next 14 billion years, these ancient photons—the universe's first light—continued ...
The chances of intelligent life emerging in our universe—and in any hypothetical ones beyond it—can be estimated by a new theoretical model which has echoes of the famous Drake Equation.
