Galaxies

Money, engineering and sheer geometry may mark an end of the line for building ever larger astronomical telescopes

The Xuntian Space Telescope is China’s entry in a global race to unlock the secrets of dark energy, and it will now lift off no earlier than mid-2025

The earliest active supermassive black hole ever seen offers clues on how these enigmatic objects first formed

Fresh images show off the Euclid space telescope’s ability to capture crisp pictures of vast swaths of sky

The James Webb Space Telescope is gazing across the universe to find galaxies close to the “cosmic dawn”—and you can explore them from the palm of your hand

Several unexplained measurements are threatening to upend scientists’ understanding of the universe’s origin and fate

A surprisingly complex galaxy cluster suggests that in the search for dark matter, nothing is as simple as it seems

The European Space Agency says a software patch restored stability to its cosmos-mapping Euclid spacecraft — but slower operations could extend the mission

This enormous structure could help explain processes close to the dawn of time—or it could be a random cosmic fluke

Black holes in the extraordinarily distant cosmos are out of tune with their host galaxies, offering insights into their formation

From dim red to brilliant blue, stellar colors span the spectrum—and reveal how much any star brings the heat

A new view of a record-shattering distant star shows it to be twice as hot as our sun and likely accompanied by a stellar companion