Ten billion years ago, well before the formation of our solar system, a gargantuan explosion threw out vast amounts of highly energetic light. A star died in a dazzling supernova, and, though it happened so long ago, the flash was only seen in 2016 and vanished shortly thereafter. But if you missed it then, worry not: We’ll be able to see the blast again.

141 AU which is equal to 141 times of the distance between Earth and Sun, Voyager 1 is able to travel the most in history. Even after travelling at the speed of 17 km/sec in space, which may sound a lot, it will take 1,700,000,000 years for Voyager 1 to cross the Milky Way Galaxy. Proxima Centauri, the second closest star from Earth after Sun is 4.2465 light year away and it would took 40,000 years for Voyager 1 to reach it.

When NASA’s Kepler telescope looked into space, it was also looking back in time. Locked into a heliocentric orbit, Kepler was set to gradually trail the Earth giving the telescope a unique view of the universe.

More than 4,400 exoplanets have been discovered to date, and in the hunt for whether there may be life out there most of our attention has been focused on Earth-like worlds. But now, astronomers have defined a new class of exoplanet called “Hycean” worlds that could be a promising place to find signs of life.

Black holes are essentially the end of the universe. They are the end of space and time as we know it. NASA describes them more plainly, noting that they are a place where an incomprehensible amount of matter meets, and where gravity pulls so much that even light cannot get out. Because no light can get out, black holes (obviously) cannot be seen. In order to see and study them, scientists need special space telescopes with distinct tools, such as radar technologies, to spot them via their emissions.

In 2017, astronomers noticed a star streaking out of the Milky Way at nearly 2 million mph (3.2 million km/h) — roughly four times faster than our sun orbits — and flying against the direction in which most stars trek around the galactic center. It's also made of completely different star stuff, mostly heavy, "metallic" atoms rather than the usual light elements. LP 40-365, as it was called, was as eye-catching as a wooden car barreling up the interstate against traffic at hundreds of miles per hour.

As a field, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence suffers from some rather significant constraints. Aside from the uncertainty involved (e.g., is there life beyond Earth we can actually communicate with?), there are the limitations imposed by technology and the very nature of space and time. For instance, scientists are forced to contend with the possibility that by the time a message is received by an intelligent species, the civilization that sent it will be long dead.

How have we ended up as the most advanced species on a small blue-green planet, orbiting a seemingly insignificant star, in one of the hundred billion galaxies in the Universe? Science has found some extraordinary answers to this question. Looking back through time, it appears that our existence depends on an apparently unlikely sequence of cosmic moments.

A dramatic triplet of galaxies takes centre stage in this latest Picture of the Week from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, which captures a three-way gravitational tug-of-war between interacting galaxies. This system —known as Arp 195— is featured in the Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies, a list which showcases some of the weirder and more wonderful galaxies in the universe.

For our Australopithecus ancestors who roamed Africa 2.5 million years ago, the bright new star in the sky surely would have aroused curiosity. As luminous as the full Moon, it would have cast shadows at night and been visible during the day. As the supernova faded over the following months, it probably also faded from memory. But it left other traces, now coming to light.

Dark matter could be even weirder than anyone thought, say cosmologists who are suggesting this mysterious substance could interact with itself in a higher dimensional universe.

A bizarre star may have its origins in one of the most energetic events in the cosmos. Astronomers have found that a star with a very unusual composition may have formed in the wake of a new type of hypernova – a stellar explosion with 10 times the energy of a supernova.

Space Mysteries: A fast radio burst was detected from within our galaxy for the first time. We may be closer to uncovering its origin.

A scientifically mysterious, isolated cloud bigger than the Milky Way has been found by a research team at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) in a "no-man's land" for galaxies. The so-called orphan or lonely cloud is full of hot gas with temperatures of 10,000-10,000,000 degrees Kelvin (K) and a total mass 10 billion times the mass of the sun. That makes it larger than the mass of small galaxies.

For centuries, Earthlings have gazed at the heavens and wondered about life among the stars. But as humans hunted for little green men, the extraterrestrials might have been watching us back. In new research, astronomers have drawn up a shortlist of nearby star systems where any inquisitive inhabitants on orbiting planets would be well placed to spot life on Earth.

Sounds like a bad trip ... but what if it's true? In upcoming research, scientists will attempt to show the universe has consciousness. Yes, really. No matter the outcome, we’ll soon learn more about what it means to be conscious—and which objects around us might have a mind of their own.

Scientists have used a powerful radio telescope in the interior of British Columbia, Canada to gain incredible new insights about one of the universe’s most perplexing and brilliant phenomena: Fast radio bursts (FRBs), which are unexplained signals from space. Sometimes they’re one-offs, and sometimes they mysteriously repeat in regular intervals, beating out a cosmic pattern.

A rare glimpse of a star before it exploded in a fiery supernova looks nothing like astronomers expected, a new study suggests. Images from the Hubble Space Telescope reveal that a relatively cool, puffy star ended its life in a hydrogen-free supernova. Until now, supernovas without hydrogen were thought to originate only from extremely hot, compact stars.

For decades, cosmologists have wondered if the large-scale structure of the universe is a fractal — that is, if it looks the same no matter how large the scale. After completing massive surveys of galaxies, scientists finally have an answer: No, but kind of, in a way.

Out of thousands of possible ways to assume how life on earth began, one of the possibilities remains that the life was created by an advanced alien civilization. As far as we have understood till now, the Universe was created about 13.7 billion years ago. Billions of stars and planets must have existed, way before the creation of the earth. Our earth was formed just 4.5 billion years ago.