It’s always amazing, and more than a little humbling, when the universe reminds us that our “common sense” is provincial, falling apart on cosmic scales. If you’re on the surface of Earth—and I’m ...

The clearest pictures yet of the newborn cosmos strengthen the prevailing model of the universe but deepen a mystery about its expansion rate. Measurements of this rate, known as the Hubble constant, ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. This is the clearest image ...

For the first time, scientists have used Earth-based telescopes to look back over 13 billion years to see how the first stars in the universe affect light emitted from the big bang. Using telescopes ...

Traveling at the speed of light 300,000 km per second sounds impossibly fast, yet even this ultimate velocity pales against ...

Space dust provides more than just awe-inspiring pictures like the Pillars of Creation. It can provide the necessary materials to build everything from planets to asteroids. But what it actually looks ...

In a glimpse of the early universe, astronomers have observed a galaxy as it appeared just 800 million years after the Big Bang—a cosmic Jekyll and Hyde that looks like any other galaxy when viewed in ...

Knotted structures once imagined by Lord Kelvin may actually have shaped the universe’s earliest moments, according to new research showing how two powerful symmetries could have created stable ...