See also stories tagged with Cosmology
Supermassive black holes (SMBHs) can have billions of solar masses, and observational evidence suggests that all large galaxies have one at their centers. However, the JWST has revealed a foundational cosmic mystery.
On a mountain in northern Chile, scientists are carefully assembling the intricate components of the NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory, one of the most advanced astronomical facilities in history. Equipped with an innovative ...
Almost 14 billion years ago, at the very beginning of the Big Bang, a mysterious energy drove an exponential expansion of the infant universe and produced all known matter, according to the prevailing inflationary universe ...
We live in a golden age for learning about the universe. Our most powerful telescopes have revealed that the cosmos is surprisingly simple on the largest visible scales. Likewise, our most powerful "microscope," the Large ...
The elliptical galaxy NGC 1270 lies about 240 million light-years away. But it's not alone. It's part of the Perseus Cluster (Abell 426), the brightest X-ray object in the sky and one of the most massive objects in the universe.
Just like we use photos to reflect on memories of our past, astrophysicists want to use images of far-off galaxies to understand what the universe was like in its juvenile years. But current imaging technology can only reach ...
In recent decades, we've learned huge amounts about the universe and its history. The rapidly developing technology of telescopes—both on Earth and in space—has been a key part of this process, and those that are due to start ...
A quasar is the extremely bright core of a galaxy that hosts an active supermassive black hole at its center. As the black hole draws in surrounding gas and dust, it blasts out an enormous amount of energy, making quasars ...
,As I finished my Ph.D. in 1992, the universe was full of mystery—we didn't even know exactly what it is made of. One could argue that cosmologists had made little progress in our understanding of these basic facts since ...
Small primordial black holes (PBHs) are one of the hot topics in astronomy and cosmology today. These hypothetical black holes are believed to have formed soon after the Big Bang, resulting from pockets of subatomic matter ...
