Cosmology

If you appreciate John J. Audubon’s exacting detail and beautiful compositions and you marvel at the encyclopedic knowledge and delicate illustrations in the famous Sibley Bird Guides you may be interested to know that there are many contemporary masters following in their footsteps today.

For the past year, astronomers around the world have been watching the center of the Milky Way in anticipation of a once-per-eon event. Right around now (or, technically, 24,000 years ago--that's roughly how far away the galactic center is in light years), a cloud of gas and dust plummeting toward our galaxy's supermassive black hole, [...]

Live streaming video by Ustream It doesn’t get much better than this (well, of course being in space might be better, albeit colder).

Traces of primordial gravitational waves could tell us how and when the early universe went through its precipitous expansion

Data from the damaged spacecraft reveal new worlds

Astronomers hope that one day soon we’ll obtain a spectrum of light that might tell us whether or not an Earth-sized exoplanet harbors life.

Charles Liu, astrophysicist at the American Museum of Natural History, answers questions submitted to our YouTube Space Lab Channel

A total lunar eclipse on April 15, 2014, was captured by Scientific American readers around the globe

A total lunar eclipse will coincide with Mars's closest approach to Earth, offering stargazers an unusual show

The IceCube experiment has taken hits from three neutrinos carrying energies above the outlandishly high peta–electron volt range that suggest they may radiate from titanic explosions in the depths of space
 

Excess gamma-ray light at the galactic center may indicate invisible dark matter particles
 

The stars in the nearby Segue 1 dwarf galaxy have fewer metals than any other galaxy known, suggesting the object is a relic from the baby universe