Universe, Space | featured news

A $2 billion experiment on the International Space Station is on the verge of explaining one of the more mysterious building blocks of the universe: The dark matter that helps hold the cosmos together....

A subatomic particle discovered last year that may be the long-sought Higgs boson might doom our universe to an unfortunate end, researchers say. The mass of the particle, which was uncovered at the world's largest particle accelerator — the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva — is a key ingredient in a calculation that portends the future of space and time.

The eXtreme Deep Field (XDF) focuses on a small patch of the constellation Fornax, containing some 5,500 galaxies. The image was culled from 10 years of photos of the same region of space shown in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, which was last updated in 2009, based on data gathered in 2003 and 2004.

Don’t get too close. Astronomers are reporting that they have taken the measure of the biggest, baddest black holes yet found in the universe, abyssal yawns 10 times the size of our solar system into which billions of Suns have vanished like a guilty thought. Such holes, they say, might be the gravitational cornerstones of galaxies and clues to the fates of the violent quasars, almost supernaturally powerful explosions in the hearts of young galaxies, that dominated the early years of the universe.

Science editor Alan Boyle's Weblog: The spiral galaxy NGC 3521 is a swirling maw of raw power, measuring 50,000 light-years across. So why on earth do astronomers call it "fluffy"?

Science editor Alan Boyle's Weblog: Is it preposterous to consider the existence of parallel universes? Or is it preposterous not to? Physicist Brian Greene would tend toward the latter view.

Our cosmos was "bruised" in collisions with other universes. Now astronomers have found the first evidence of these impacts in the cosmic microwave background.

Late in 2009 year we witnessed the largest explosion ever recorded: a super giant star two hundred times bigger than the sun utterly obliterated by runaway thermonuclear reactions triggered by gamma ray-driven antimatter production.

A young star observed by the Spitzer Space Telescope appears to be home to a wild -- and young -- planetary system that shares some of the frenetic dynamics thought to have shaped the early years of our own solar system.

Completing an orbit in less than an Earth day, planet Wasp-18b should have burned up, according to accepted theory. Scientists have discovered a planet that shouldn't exist. The finding, they say, could alter our understanding of orbital dynamics, a field considered pretty well settled since the time of astronomer Johannes Kepler 400 years ago.