The Universe is growing. Scientists have known as much for decades, but the rate at which it is getting bigger has been the topic of debate, with different measurements pointing to different rates of growth. Now, in an attempt at ruling out anomalies in the data, researchers have solidified their findings and published them in …
Centuries of astronomical observation and technological advances have revealed a lot about the Universe we all call home, but it’s also raised plenty of new questions. Researchers have crunched a lot of numbers to try to make sense of the Big Bang and the billions of years that followed, but something just isn’t adding up. …
There’s no shortage of interesting things to see in our own galaxy, but astronomers love finding new galactic neighbors as well. Observing other galaxies can teach scientists a lot about how the massive structures form, live, and die. Using images from the Hubble Space Telescope, researchers studying distant, dim stars accidentally stumbled upon something they …
As technology improves and instruments used to study the cosmos become more and more advanced, we’re answering a lot of questions about our place in the universe, but we’re also coming up with entirely new ones. One of the most mysterious phenomena that scientist have observed are called fast radio bursts (FRBs), which are brief …
Most of the mass in the universe is made up of a kind of matter that none of us have ever seen. It’s called “dark matter” and, despite being incredibly abundant, it’s also extremely difficult to study. Decades-old calculations suggested that there is more dark matter around younger galaxies than the ancient ones from the …
We only see one star, our Sun, up close on a daily basis, but the Milky Way is absolutely packed with them. It’s estimated that there are over 300 billion stars in our galaxy alone, and perhaps as many as 400 billion. With so much sky to cover, scientists are doing their best to catalog …
When NASA sets its sights on a far-away galaxy, there’s often a lot to take in. Even if it only appears to be a dim blob, researchers can often combine various observations to determine the galaxy’s size and shape. Normally, they’re just there, sitting in space, creating new stars and doing the other things that …
Our Solar System is incredibly old by human standards. The Sun, sitting in the center, is thought to be just over 4.6 billion years old, which is an almost unfathomable amount of time to you and I. But it’s actually not all that impressive when it comes to stars. A new survey of one particular …
Many of the objects NASA and other scientific bodies choose to study in space are incredibly old, but that’s not the case with Kes 75. Located a mere 19,000 light years from Earth, Kes 75 is a ultra-dense chunk of a star that went supernova, and now scientists are calling it the youngest known pulsar …
If intelligent alien life exists somewhere in space it’s abundantly clear that we haven’t made meaningful contact with it yet. Various scientific bodies have devoted themselves to searching for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence and come up totally blank, but why? The famous Fermi paradox, named for physicist Enrico Fermi, asks if life is indeed common …
