Milky Way

After years of downtime for upgrades, the world’s premier gravitational-wave observatories are coming back online with big hopes for transformative discoveries

White dwarfs, Earth-sized exoplanets, early galaxies and even Saturn’s moon Enceladus are on the agenda for JWST’s second year in space, but exomoons and others miss out

Betelgeuse, the red star at the shoulder of the constellation Orion, has been acting strange, raising hopes for the spectacle of a lifetime

A new way to gauge the universe’s expansion rate has delivered a confusing result that may conflict with previous related measurements

Hints of water vapor on a world called GJ 486 b could just as well come from the planet’s host star

A dying star swallowing a giant planet hints at the fate awaiting our solar system some five billion years from now

We only have a few clues about where the sun was born. Some new ones point to a crowded origin story for our nearest star

Red dwarfs are dim bulbs but host more Earth-like planets than any other kind of star

Before exploding as supernovae, massive Wolf-Rayet stars spew gas and dust into space, seeding the formation of future stellar and planetary systems

Two giant telescopes—one in Australia, the other in South Africa—will comprise the supersensitive Square Kilometer Array

Researchers are convinced the James Webb Space Telescope has glimpsed an unexpected population of galaxies in the early universe. Now they’re trying to decide what this means for our understanding of the cosmos

A new JWST image of a star surrounded by strange, rippling spirals reveals a hidden chapter in the story of how dust spreads across the cosmos