Universe

Seen just 800 million years after the big bang, an object called LAP1-B is a galactic building block that seems to hold some of the first stars to ever shine

Models giving dark matter more complex behavior could help solve multiple cosmic mysteries

The Kardashev scale is an interesting but flawed gauge of a civilization’s growth

Rather than slowly condensing over millions of years, the first building blocks of Earth and other planets may have formed rapidly in a chaotic disk at the dawn of the solar system

Just how big can a star become? The answer depends on when in cosmic history you’re asking the question

Despite years of debate and follow-up studies, an odd streak of cosmic light still defies a final explanation. Is it a giant black hole screaming through intergalactic space?

The science of the zodiac is more intriguing than astrology would have you think

Although astronomers have found thousands of exoplanets, the number of confirmed exomoons—and exorings—is still zero. But that may soon change

The collision of supermassive black holes shakes the entire cosmos, hard

A “disappearing” star in the Andromeda galaxy is the closest and best candidate for a newborn black hole that astronomers have ever seen

You might think galaxies can’t ever find each other in our runaway cosmos, but it turns out gravity can sometimes overcome even the stretching of space itself

Dating to only a billion years after the big bang, JADES-ID1 may be the earliest, most distant galaxy protocluster astronomers have ever seen