Galaxies

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.

A new estimate finds that the Milky Way, once thought to be twice as massive as Andromeda, may actually only have half our neighbor galaxy's mass. Christopher Intagliata reports 

 

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.

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.

Tipping the scales at less than about a million suns in mass, middleweight black holes may hold clues to how their much larger siblings, and galaxies, first formed

The galaxy is teeming with planets. Scientists are straining to peer into their atmospheres to seek signs of extraterrestrial life

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

To learn how the universe evolved over time, a space telescope gazes back to the earliest galaxies ever observed

By the latest estimate, the observable universe contains 200 billion galaxies. Astronomers wonder: Why so few?

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

Proof of parallel universes radically different from our own may still lie beyond the domain of science

Our universe may have started not with a big bang but with a big bounce—an implosion that triggered an explosion, all driven by exotic quantum-gravitational effects