Universe

Strange whirlpools of plasma seen in the sharpest images ever captured of our star help explain the deep origins of Earth-threatening space weather and more

A private spacecraft launched to boost the decaying orbit of NASA’s Swift Observatory is now suffering from potentially mission-ending malfunctions

Using the new Vera C. Rubin Observatory, astronomers are beginning the largest and deepest survey of the sky. What will they see?

For the first time ever, astronomers have found two sibling stars that each exploded as a supernova, giving us a new view of these epochal cosmic cataclysms

A recent study in the journal Nature carries cosmos-quaking implications for our understanding of the universe—except a new preprint says that it’s wrong

Probing the dawn of the cosmos for clues to how the first galaxies and supermassive black holes formed is no easy feat

After decades of debate, the scientific case is clear for Europe’s Future Circular Collider, a colossal successor to the Large Hadron Collider. But transforming this megaproject from vision to reality is far from guaranteed

A new study claims that the universe isn’t entirely the same no matter where you look—a radical proposal

Astronomers may have found the remains of two long-dead stellar siblings

Planets might exist in the least likely place you’d imagine—around the outskirts of supermassive black holes

Deep surveys of the sky have turned up galaxies vastly larger than our own. Are there even bigger ones yet to be seen?

Our universe appears flat—but this observation still leaves plenty of options for its true shape. In fact, our cosmos could resemble a donut