A trio of researchers affiliated with several institutions in the U.S. and Canada has found evidence that suggests nuclear material beneath the surface of neutron stars may be the strongest material in the universe. In their paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters, M. E. Caplan, A. S. Schneider, and C. J. Horowitz describe their neutron star simulation and what it showed.

Scientists agree that the story of the universe began 13.8 billion years ago, when everything — all the matter and energy and even space itself — emerged from the extraordinarily hot, dense cauldron known as the Big Bang. But ask a scientist what came before that first moment, and you’re likely to get a shrug. To many, thinking about a time before the beginning of time makes no sense.

To be housed in a building 22 stories high, on a plateau of the Atacama Desert of Chile, the Giant Magellan Telescope will be the largest optical telescope ever built.

A giant ring of black holes has been discovered 300 million light-years away, offering new clues about what happens when galaxies collide. Using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, astronomers detected a very bright source of X-rays that is likely fueled by either a ring of stellar-mass black holes or neutron stars — the small, dense corpses left after stellar explosions, — according to a new study.

In astronomy, cutting-edge technology often begins with a bunch of bulldozers, busted rocks, and dump trucks. So it goes with the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT), which will the world's largest and most powerful when it sees "first light" in 2024. Astronomers hope to use the huge observatory to study the ancient universe and look for signs of alien life. Construction crews atop a Chilean mountain range broke ground for the $1 billion project on Tuesday.

Scientists have found that the universe we live in is not the first one to ever exist. A group of leading physicists have found that eons ago, other universes existed and they had black holes, just like the current universe, the Daily Mail reported. They say that cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB) – the same thing that causes white noise on TVs – is evidence of the remnants of these blackholes.

Canada’s shiny new radio telescope is up and running, and it just heard something very, very odd coming from deep space. The Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME for short) is located in British Columbia, and it spends its time listening intently for signals beaming through the vacuum of space. Most of the time, radio telescopes like this don’t hear anything out of the ordinary...

We all might be anxiously awaiting the eventual launch of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope — which has been stuck in an endless series of delays thanks to the idiots at Northrop Grumman — but the trusty Hubble is still delivering some pretty fantastic views of the heavens. The telescope’s latest snapshot is a real doozy, and it’s going to make you feel like you barely even exist.

A distant galaxy appears filled with dark matter. The outermost stars in the Cosmic Seagull, a galaxy 11.3 billion light-years away, race too fast to be propelled by the gravity of the galaxy’s gas and stars alone. Instead, they move as if urged on by an invisible force, indicating the hidden presence of dark matter, astrophysicist Verónica Motta of the University of Valparaíso in Chile and her colleagues report August 8 at arXiv.org.

Since the 1990s, astrophysicists have known that for the past few billion years, the Universe has been experiencing an accelerated rate of expansion. This gave rise to the theory that the Universe is permeated by a mysterious invisible energy known as "dark energy", which acts against gravity and is pushing the cosmos apart. In time, this energy will become the dominant force in the Universe, causing all stars and galaxies to spread beyond the cosmic horizon.

While predictions of the future can never be absolutely certain, present understanding in various scientific fields allows for the prediction of far-future events, if only in the broadest outline. These fields include astrophysics, which has revealed how planets and stars form, interact, and die; particle physics, which has revealed how matter behaves at the smallest scales; evolutionary biology, which predicts how life will evolve over time; and plate tectonics, which shows how continents shift over millennia.

A single star, careening around the monster black hole in the center of the Milky Way, has provided astronomers with new proof that Albert Einstein was right about gravity. More than 100 years ago, Einstein’s general theory of relativity revealed that gravity is the result of matter curving the fabric of spacetime (SN: 10/17/15, p. 16). Now, in a paper published July 26 in Astronomy & Astrophysics, a team of researchers reports the observation of a hallmark of general relativity known as gravitational redshift.

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A team of astronomers led by George Becker at the University of California, Riverside, has made a surprising discovery: 12.5 billion years ago, the most opaque place in the universe contained relatively little matter. It has long been known that the universe is filled with a web-like network of dark matter and gas. This “cosmic web” accounts for most of the matter in the universe, whereas galaxies like our own Milky Way make up only a small fraction.

Since the Universe is big and old, and life on Earth didn't take relatively long to evolve, then life should be everywhere in the Universe.

Distances in the expanding Universe don’t work like you’d expect. Unless, that is, you learn to think like a cosmologist.

A new measurement of how fast the universe is expanding reveals an odd gap.

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has uncovered a strange kind of galaxy surprisingly close to home. A new study published Monday in Nature reports that Hubble scientists have found a “relic galaxy” called NGC 1277 about 240 million light-years away near the Perseus cluster. The galaxy is only a quarter the size of the Milky Way, but in its early days, scientists think NGC 1277 could crank out stars about 1,000 times faster than our own galaxy.

A final theory explaining how mankind might detect parallel universes was completed by Stephen Hawking shortly before he died, it has emerged.

One of the great theories of modern cosmology is that the universe began in a Big Bang. This is not just an idea but a scientific theory backed up by numerous lines of evidence. For a start, there is the cosmic microwave background, which is a kind of echo of the big bang; then there is the ongoing expansion of the cosmos, which when imagined backwards, hints at a Big Bang-type origin; and the abundance of the primordial elements, such as helium-4, helium-3, deuterium and so on, can all be calculated using the theory.

In a study published today in Nature Astronomy, an international team of researchers announced the discovery of the most distant star ever observed. The team detected the blue supergiant star — which shone when the universe was just one-third its current age — with the help of both the Hubble Space Telescope and an observational phenomenon known as gravitational lensing.

Researchers from around the globe are on the hunt for elusive dark matter particles by building the world's most sensitive detector.

Although we use it every day, time is complicated.

Even after more than 27 years in space, the Hubble Space Telescope can still take one heck of a photo. The image above was taken earlier this year and shows two galaxies merging into one. Described by the European Space Agency and NASA as a "twisted cosmic knot" in the constellation Cancer, it's about 250 million light-years from earth. The new galaxy, called NGC 2623, has the unique knot shape because of a collision between two previously distinct galaxies.

Stephen Hawking has revealed from beyond the grave his final scientific theory - that the universe is a hologram. The cosmologist, who died on March 14, has challenged previous theories of cosmic "inflation" and the "multiverse" in a new paper published in the Journal Of High Energy Physics. Scientists generally believe that for a tiny fraction of a second after the Big Bang, the universe expanded incredibly rapidly before settling into its present state, filled with stars and galaxies - the inflation theory.

Astronomers using cutting-edge skywatching devices have identified an extremely fast-growing black hole, cataloging it as a ‘monster’ that eats the mass equivalent of our sun every two days.

The Universe is so unimaginably big, and it's positively teeming with an almost infinite supply of potentially life-giving worlds. So where the heck is everybody?

Astronomers Seppo Mattila and Miguel Pérez-Torres usually study the natural deaths of stars, but they weren’t going to pass up the chance to investigate a stellar murder. A new paper in Science describes how they nabbed photographic evidence that a supermassive black hole in a relatively nearby galaxy tore apart and consumed part of a star in a phenomenon called a tidal disruption event (TDE), spewing jets of material in the process. Scientists have observed these cosmic crime scenes before, but this was the first time anyone managed to get such detailed images of the jets and their changing structure over time.

"Where are they?" famously asked Italian physicist Enrico Fermi in the 1950s. By "they," he meant space aliens. Fermi figured that if the galaxy contained space-faring civilizations it would only take them a few tens of millions of years to populate it. So why hasn't there been a saucer-landing-take-me-to-your leader moment already? This is the Fermi Paradox.

The Andromeda Galaxy (M31) is the largest member of the Milky Way’s gang of galactic neighbors, known as the Local Group. With around a trillion suns worth of mass, Andromeda’s gravitational influence is a force to be reckoned with. And according to new research, no galaxy in the Local Group knows this better than M32, an oddball satellite galaxy now orbiting Andromeda.

After nearly 20 years, the record of the most distant radio galaxy ever discovered has been broken. A team led by Ph.D. student Aayush Saxena (Leiden Observatory, the Netherlands) has found a radio galaxy from a time when the universe was only 7 percent of its current age, at a distance of 12 billion light-years.

Local alien Blixbor Raxorit once again boastfully yammered on about his Linux-based human life simulator called ‘Earth.'

Meet the Milky Way’s elderly neighbours. It turns out that the faint galaxies orbiting our own are among the oldest in our universe – a discovery hailed as the equivalent to finding the remains of the first humans that inhabited Earth. These satellite galaxies, including Ursa Major and Bootes I, are thought to be more than 13 billion years old. The closest is probably Segue-1, some 75,000 light-years away, says Sownak Bose of the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics.

Astronomers have just assembled one of the most comprehensive portraits yet of the universe’s evolutionary history.

As researchers learn more about dark matter's complexities, it seems possible that our galaxy lives on top of a shadow galaxy without us even knowing it.