That gold on your ring finger is stellar – and not just in a complimentary way. In a finding that may overthrow our understanding of where Earth’s heavy elements such as gold and platinum come from, new research by a University of Guelph physicist suggests that most of them were spewed from a lar

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?

Black holes are some of the most intriguing and mysterious objects in the universe, inspiring entire libraries of both scientific research and science fiction, from Einstein to the movie Interstellar. Yet despite the hold their inconceivable gravity has on our imaginations, as well as our understanding of physics, humans have never actually seen a black hole.

A network of eight radio telescopes around the world helped to record the image

Are we living in a computer simulation? The question seems absurd. Yet there are plenty of smart people who are convinced that this is not only possible but perhaps likely. In an influential paper that laid out the theory, the Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom showed that at least one of three possibilities is true: 1) All human-like civilizations in the universe go extinct before they develop the technological capacity to create simulated realities; 2) if any civilizations do reach this phase of technological maturity, none of them will bother to run simulations; or 3...

tephen 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.

Like the planet Tatooine from Star Wars, two suns — one bright, one dim and red— rise over the horizon of Kepler 47d. But unlike dry and sandy Tatooine, this planet’s surface is gassy and indistinct. The system also holds two smaller planets; one planet closer to the double suns, and one farther out. Both lack a solid surface. If you visited in a spaceship, all the planets would be easy to spot because they’re packed, along with their stars, into a space smaller than Earth’s orbit around the Sun.

Everything has a beginning. That’s true for stories, for people, for the universe and even for chemistry. The Big Bang itself produced just a handful of elements (variations of hydrogen, helium and lithium nuclei), so researchers have a pretty good sense of what the first atoms and molecules might have been. But the very first molecular bond to form, linking together atoms of different elements in a single molecule, has long been missing in action.

NASA and ESA celebrate the 29th Birthday of the Hubble space telescope on 24th April 2019 with a stunning image of the Southern Crab Nebula.

Explaining a discrepancy between what was happening 13 billion years ago and now may require new physics.

Look at this and you can see 265,000 galaxies reaching back across 13.3 billion years. It took 7,500 exposures from the Hubble Space Telescope to make this mosaic of the distant universe called the Hubble Legacy Field. Take a moment and feel the awe. The Legacy Field follows a succession of Hubble images that have captured more and more previously unseen galaxies. This new view combines observations from several Hubble deep-field surveys taken across 16 years.

Get ready for an epic journey through the cosmos. This film won "Best Short Film" of 2004, and it's no wonder why. The Hubble Space Telescope has revolutionized our perspective on the number of galaxies, stars, and planets in our universe. And you can experience its most astounding images in this award-winning film.

Just a month into a renewed observing campaign with a trio of detectors, physicists today announced they have spotted more gravitational waves—fleeting ripples in space set off when two massive objects such as black holes spiral into each other. The collaboration has now bagged 13 merging black hole pairs, as well as two pairs of neutron stars. But even as detections accumulate, one theorist has made an advance that could change how the team analyzes the signals and make it easier to test Albert Einstein’s theory of gravity, general relativity.

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.

For one brief shining moment after the 2015 detection of gravitational waves from colliding black holes, astronomers held out hope that the universe’s mysterious dark matter might consist of a plenitude of black holes sprinkled throughout the universe. UC Berkeley physicists have dashed those hopes.

The identification of three white dwarf stars zooming at hyper-fast velocities might provide evidence to support an alternative theory explaining the formation of Type 1a supernovae, researchers say. Type 1a supernovae, orthodoxy holds, arise when two white dwarf stars locked in a binary orbit merge with each other, kick-starting a runaway nuclear fusion reaction and consequent massive explosion.

A faraway star in the southern sky is flickering in an odd manner that suggests a bizarre cloud of material—or something even stranger—is in orbit around it. Discovered by astronomers using a telescope in Chile, the star is reminiscent of two other enigmatic astrophysical objects, one thought to harbor a planet with rings 200 times larger than those of Saturn, the other most famous for the remote possibility it is encircled by “alien megastructures.” The newfound star may help shed some light on one or both of these puzzling objects.

We need to talk about the dark ages. No, not those dark ages after the fall of the western Roman Empire. The cosmological dark ages. The time in our universe, billions of years ago, before the formation of the first stars. And we need to talk about the cosmic dawn: the birth of those first stars, a tumultuous epoch that completely reshaped the face the cosmos into its modern form.

An international research team including The Australian National University (ANU) has used the Kepler space telescope in coordination with ground-based telescopes to witness the first moments of a star dying in unprecedented detail. The astronomers witnessed the star dying a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, as part of a project that aims to solve the mystery of how stars explode.

In 1977, the sound of extraterrestrials was heard by human ears for the first time — or so people at the time thought. The Wow! Signal was detected by astronomer Jerry Ehman using Ohio State University’s Big Ear radio telescope. It is a radio signal detector that, at the time, was pointed at a group of stars called Chi Sagittarii in the constellation Sagittarius.

It shines with a brightness equivalent to 600 trillion suns. “We don’t expect to find many quasars brighter than that in the whole observable universe,” said the astronomers. Researchers announced this week (January 9, 2019) at the 233rd meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle, Washington, that they’ve discovered the brightest quasar yet known, detected from the period when the universe was just beginning to make luminous objects, such as stars and galaxies.

The universe is far from homogenous. Rather, stars, and the galaxies that contain them, clump together in some places, brought together by their shared gravitational attraction. Astronomers have historically found clusters of galaxies in the sky to be relatively easy to spot, as they’re extremely large and bright. But one new study suggests that a third of all galaxy clusters have been hiding undiscovered out in the cosmos.

Astronomers may have discovered a new way that stars can die. A mysteriously brief and bright burst whimsically called the “Cow” reveals an entirely new type of stellar death. The details of that stellar doom, however, remain hazy. Scientists are still debating whether the flare-up, spotted on June 16, 2018, was from an unusual type of star that was eaten by a black hole, or from an old, massive star exploding in a weird sort of supernova.

Black holes are great at sucking up matter. So great, in fact, that not even light can escape their grasp (hence the name).

Like a mountain looming over a calm lake, it seems the universe may once have had a perfect mirror image. That's the conclusion a team of Canadian scientists reached after extrapolating the laws of the universe both before and after the Big Bang. Physicists have a pretty good idea of the structure of the universe just a couple of seconds after the Big Bang, moving forward to today. In many ways, fundamental physics then worked as it does today.

One of the most cherished science fiction scenarios is using a black hole as a portal to another dimension or time or universe. That fantasy may be closer to reality than previously imagined. Black holes are perhaps the most mysterious objects in the universe. They are the consequence of gravity crushing a dying star without limit, leading to the formation of a true singularity – which happens when an entire star gets compressed down to a single point yielding an object with infinite density.

A new study led by Yale University astronomers tells the story of a galaxy that ran out of gas. It’s a story as old as the universe itself: A galaxy is born, brimming with new stars, its spiral arms stretching and curving. But then it runs into trouble, veering too close to the center of a nearby galaxy cluster. The surrounding cluster begins to siphon off the galaxy’s star-making gas, until it loses its spiral arms and becomes a dead relic.

There are a few rules in the Universe that seem likely to never be broken. Particles cannot travel faster than the speed of light in a vacuum; the entropy of a closed system can never decrease; energy and momentum must be conserved. But if the rules that the Universe plays by are different than we understand them today, many things that appear to be forbidden today may be possible after all.

Long an underfunded, fringe field of science, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence may be ready to go mainstream. Astronomer Jason Wright is determined to see that happen. At a meeting in Seattle of the American Astronomical Society in January, Wright convened “a little ragtag group in a tiny room” to plot a course for putting the scientific field, known as SETI, on NASA’s agenda.

One of the Hubble Space Telescope's most famous images peered even deeper into the cosmos than scientists had thought. That photo is the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field (HUDF), which combines hundreds of images taken by the space telescope over multiple years into the deepest view of the universe ever created. The composite pic of a small patch of sky contains a whopping 10,000 galaxies, astronomers have estimated. (The HUDF also refers to that patch of sky, not just imagery of it.)

The greatest mystery of modern radio astronomy comes down to just three letters: FRB. They stand for fast radio bursts, signals that continue to defy explanation. As the name implies, these bursts of radio waves last just a millisecond or two. They’re also incredibly strong, among the brightest radio sources in the sky. That’s despite traveling an incredible distance, up to billions of light-years. Do the math, and it’s clear how powerful these things are. One FRB can easily broadcast more energy in a moment than the sun produces in a day.

Our Milky Way galaxy will survive in its current form a bit longer than some astronomers had thought, a new study suggests. The monster collision between our Milky Way and fellow spiral galaxy Andromeda will occur about 4.5 billion years from now, according to the new research, which is based on observations made by Europe’s Gaia spacecraft. Some prominent previous estimates had predicted the crash would happen significantly sooner, in about 3.9 billion years.

Come 2023, NASA will have a new eye tracking the heavens and looking to solve some of the greatest scientific mysteries we know of. That's thanks to a newly approved mission called Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer and nicknamed SPHEREx. The instrument is designed to tackle two key questions: how the universe evolved and how common some crucial building blocks of life are across our galaxy.

A San Diego State University astrophysicist has helped discover evidence of a gigantic remnant surrounding an exploding star—a shell of material so huge, it must have been erupting on a regular basis for millions of years. When a white dwarf, the core of a dead star, is in a close orbit with another star, it pulls gas from the other star. The gas becomes heated and compressed, eventually exploding to create a nova. This explosion causes the star to brighten by a millionfold and eject material at thousands of miles per second.

What keeps George Hotz, the enigmatic hacker and founder of self-driving startup Comma.ai, up at night is not whether his autonomous car company will be successful or what other entrepreneurial venture he might embark on next. No, instead, Hotz says he’s tortured by the possibility that all of us are in an advanced simulation observed by either an omnipotent extraterrestrial or supernatural being, or an artificial intelligence far beyond the realm of human conception and understanding.