Big Bang

The galaxy cluster Abell 2744, which lies in front of the galaxy containing the newly discovered black hole

Astronomers Spot the Oldest Black Hole Ever Seen, Shedding Light on the Early Universe

Dating to just 470 million years after the Big Bang, the ancient cosmic structure could help researchers understand how the first black holes formed

From left to right: actor Stephanie Hsu, director Daniel Kwan, actor Jamie Lee Curtis, director Daniel Scheinert, actor Michelle Yeoh, producer Jonathan Wang and actor Ke Huy Quan at the 2023 Film Independent Spirit Awards.

The Science Behind the Multiverse in 'Everything Everywhere All At Once'

The movie that won Best Picture imagines a reality composed of an uncountable number of universes

A composite of the SKA telescopes that combines real images with an artist's impression. 

Construction of World’s Largest Radio Telescope Begins

Scientists will use its instruments to study the early universe

An artist's rendering of a field of first-generation stars as they would have appeared 100 million years after the Big Bang. 

An Early Star’s Remains May Be Swirling Around a Black Hole

The first stars exploded long ago, but scientists say they've detected the chemical fingerprint that one of them left behind

Both beer and wine are thought to predate distilled spirits.

'Which Came First: Beer or Wine?' and More Questions From Our Readers

You've got questions. We've got experts

DESI will analyze light collected by the four-meter Mayall telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory near Tucson, Arizona.

New Project Aims to Create Most Detailed 3-D Map of the Universe

An instrument named “DESI” will chart up to 40 million galaxies, ten times more than any previous survey

Astronomers have discovered the oldest and most distant quasar in the universe. The quasar, named J0313-1806, formed just 670 million years after the Big Bang some 13 billion light years away.

This 13-Billion-Year-Old Supermassive Black Hole Is the Oldest Ever Found

Huge black hole is so old it offers a glimpse into the early universe, and so big it challenges ideas of how black holes form

A Japanese space capsule seen falling back to Earth over Australia. The capsule, released from the JAXA space probe Hayabusa2, contains samples of an asteroid called Ryugu that is located roughly 180 million miles from our planet.

Japan Retrieves Space Capsule Full of Asteroid Samples in Australia

The successful landing marks the completion of Japan’s Hayabusa2 mission, which studied the 3,000-foot-wide asteroid Ryugu

The goal, Ruth Jarman says, is to “transcend the data so that it becomes something else"

'HALO' Makes Art Out of Subatomic Particle Collisions at Art Basel

The site-specific installation by British artist duo Semiconductor revisits the universe’s first moments

The Small Magellanic Cloud, where some of your atoms likely originate

Half of Our Atoms May Come From Other Galaxies

According to computer simulations, large galaxies may grow by sucking in matter smaller star clusters expel

Was the Speed of Light Even Faster in the Early Universe?

Physicists propose a way to test if light exceeded Einstein's constant just after the Big Bang

LIGO's founding fathers, from left: Rainer Weiss, Kip Thorne and Barry Barish. Not pictured: Ronald Drever

Meet the Team of Scientists Who Discovered Gravitational Waves

This year, the geniuses behind LIGO announced that they had finally found what Albert Einstein had predicted a century ago

Galaxy GN-z11 seen in its youth by the Hubble telescope. GN-z11 is shown as it existed 13.4 billion years in the past, just 400 million years after the Big Bang.

If Telescopes Are Time Machines, the JWST Will Take Us the Furthest Back Yet

The James Webb Space Telescope promises to peer back into the making of the first galaxies

This image was taken inside the Large Hadron Collider just a few months before its launch in 2008.

Inside the Atom Smasher at CERN

What you can see on a tour of the largest particle collider in the world

The Universe’s Oldest Stars Likely Lit Up Way Later Than Once Thought

Data gathered by the European Space Agency’s Planck telescope indicates that the universe was dark for about 550 million years after the big bang

The sun sets behind the BICEP2 telescope at the South Pole.

Nope, We Have Not Detected Gravitational Waves (Yet)

Leaked news from teams studying the early universe says the signal hailed as our first peek at space-time ripples really is just dust

The Pope Would Like You to Accept Evolution and the Big Bang

The Roman Catholic Church is pro-evolution and Big Bang, but with a twist

Cyclists Inspecting Ancient Petroglyphs, Utah, 1998: Texas-based photographer Terry Falke captures several of the exhibition's themes in this image of cyclists examining petroglyphs and bullet holes in a stratified rock face by the side of the road in Utah. "You’ve got the ultimate strata, which is man-made, so the idea is that we are impacting, we’re leaving our mark on the Earth over time as well," says Talasek.

What Does "Deep Time" Mean to You?

An art exhibition at the National Academy of Sciences offers perspective on our geological past and future

Less than a mile from the South Pole, the Dark Sector Lab’s Bicep2 telescope (at left) searches for signs of inflation.

Listening to the Big Bang

Just-reported ripples in space may open a window on the very beginning of the universe

An artist's rendering of the Big Bang.

A New Cosmic Discovery Could Be The Closest We’ve Come to the Beginning of Time

Scientists detect the signature of gravitational waves generated in the first moments of the Big Bang

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