Galaxies

Andromeda and the Milky Way may collide, or they may safely swing past each other. Time will tell

A single-celled organism’s pathfinding reveals connections in the universe’s vast “cosmic web”

There’s more than one way for a star to die. Some go with a whimper, and some go with a very, very big bang

The cosmos is dark. The Lilly-Madau diagram reveals that it will become much darker still

The human brain loves seeing patterns, even when they aren’t really there

The James Webb Space Telescope’s search for the earliest stars and black holes has yielded a very weird, very red, puzzle

Analyzing 1,504 supernovae into the distant universe, astronomers have shown the clearest evidence yet for cosmological time dilation as predicted by Einstein

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope observed an unusually large and highly luminous galaxy at a record-breaking 290 million years after the big bang

How do astronomers find the darkest objects in the universe?

As the Event Horizon Telescope pursues ambitious upgrades, the project’s latest results reveal the magnetic fields around our galaxy’s supermassive black hole

The ocean’s twice-daily rise and fall is only the most obvious effect of tides—they slow Earth’s spin and shape stars and galaxies, too

Figuring out whether there are more stars in the universe than sand grains on Earth’s seashores requires math—and imagination