Galaxies

Gaia, Europe’s Milky Way–mapping spacecraft, shut down earlier this year. It was arguably the most important—and most overlooked—astronomy project of the 21st century

Galaxies come in many shapes and sizes, and trying to define them is difficult

ORCs—odd radio circles—are one of the weirdest recent discoveries in the heavens above

Nicknamed the “Big Wheel,” a giant, spiral-shaped disk galaxy was spotted in an unusually crowded part of the early universe just two billion years after the big bang

The next year of science on the James Webb Space Telescope has been announced amid mounting budgetary uncertainty that could affect the unparalleled observatory

A long-simmering disagreement over the universe’s present-day expansion rate shows no signs of resolution, leaving experts increasingly vexed

The final results from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope offer the sharpest, most sensitive view of the early cosmos that anyone has ever seen

With radio and infrared telescopes, astronomers can pierce the dusty veil of our galaxy and map its farthest reaches

Strange x-ray pulses hint at a surprisingly long-lived white dwarf orbiting precariously close to a supermassive black hole

According to a tenet scientists call the cosmological principle, our place in space is in no way exceptional. But recent observations could overturn this long-held assumption

The celestial equivalent to latitude and longitude lets astronomers find their way across the heavens

The universe’s light-starved early epochs, as well as the first stars and galaxies, lie beyond the reach of conventional observatories but could be revealed by a new generation of radio telescope arrays