SA Special Editions

The latest star maps are rewriting the story of our Milky Way, revealing a much more tumultuous history than astronomers suspected

Dark matter could be an entire dark sector of the universe, with its own particles and forces

Medical, financial and ethical hurdles stand in the way of the dream to settle in space

Astronomers are puzzled about how the oldest supermassive black holes could have grown so big so early in cosmic history

Dark matter has turned out to be more elusive than physicists had hoped

A new generation of telescopes could peer back to the earliest epochs of the universe

Mysterious “islands” help to explain what happens to information that falls into a black hole

The James Webb Space Telescope should soon be able to spot the first generation of stars in space

NASA spent years and billions of dollars collecting Martian samples to bring home. Now they might be stranded

Estimates of how fast the universe is expanding disagree. Could a new form of dark energy resolve the problem?

The universe has a habit of disproving “unassailable” facts

The search for extraterrestrial life has periodically been turned upside down

After black holes devour stars, sometimes the feast comes back up

For two decades now, the iconic twin Voyager spacecraft have been quietly overturning everything we thought we knew about the boundary between our solar system and interstellar space