Galaxies

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

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

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

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

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.

You don’t need your nose to know what something smells like. Perfumers and astronomers can detect and recreate scents based on the chemical signatures of the molecules in the air, even if that air is very very far away.

Cosmic dust is crucial to the birth of stars and planets, but how so much of it came to be present in the young universe has been a mystery

Theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli, one of the creators of loop quantum gravity, and his collaborator Hal Haggard have just come out with a new paper on black holes.

A galaxy four billion light-years from us was has three supermassive black holes at its center, with two in a tight formation. Clara Moskowitz reports

Mysterious light at the center of the milky way could be our first look at dark particles

Recommendations from Scientific American

Newly discovered lobes stretch tens of thousands of light-years above and below the Milky Way's disk. Where they come from remains a mystery