Cosmology

A star 890,000 light-years away patrols our galactic frontier

After a ten year journey, NASA’s New Horizons mission is still 420 million kilometers from the Pluto system – but that’s close enough to begin to see the orbital dance of an icy world and its major moon.

In a month’s time, the end result of two-and-a-half years of research, thinking, writing, re-writing, re-re-writing, editing, mulling, puzzling, coffee-drinking, beer-swilling, swearing, and tweaking will hit the shelves in the form of my new book The Copernicus Complex.

Is energy always conserved, even in the case of the expanding universe?
 

Looking for a few good popular math books? In the latest New York Times Book Review, I look at five terrific recent ones: Jordan Ellenberg's How Not to Be Wrong, David J.

Dark energy does more than hurry along the expansion of the universe. It also has a stranglehold on the shape and spacing of galaxies

Some say its glory days are long gone, but the universe has life in it yet. Brand-new types of celestial phenomena will unfold over the coming billions and trillions of years

Is the theory at the heart of modern cosmology deeply flawed?

The sun was born in a family of stars. What became of them?

It's summer in the northern hemisphere of a small, damp, planet orbiting a middle-aged star in a spiral galaxy of matter enjoying a brief heyday before colliding with another galaxy in some 4 billion orbits of the same small, damp, planet.

Three experiments will begin upgrades that could help them corner the particles responsible for the universe’s missing mass
 

David Spergel explains why a widely publicized gravitational-wave discovery could be wrong, and how it could affect the public’s perception of science