Astronomy

The James Webb Space Telescope keeps breaking its own records for peering deeper into space and time. It's now detected a galaxy candidate about 35 billion light-years from Earth, which if confirmed would make it the most distant galaxy ever found.

Everything has to end eventually – including the universe itself. It might be hard to imagine a catastrophe big enough to affect the entirety of existence, but here are some of the leading hypotheses about how the universe could end, and when.

James Webb Space Telescope's historic first images showed a galaxy cluster billions of light-years away, but now it’s turned its sights on something much closer to home. NASA has released infrared images of Jupiter used to test Webb's instruments.

Astronomers have measured the strongest magnetic field ever found in the universe. The honor goes to a powerful type of neutron star, with a surface magnetic field of over 1.6 billion Tesla.

If you’ve seen the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope this week, you might have heard the term “gravitational lensing” being thrown around. But what does it mean exactly? And how can it help this new telescope make discoveries?

Astronomers have detected an extremely strange radio signal from a distant galaxy that pulses with a heartbeat-like rhythm. This signal lasted about 1,000 times longer than other fast radio bursts, and had a clear periodic pattern to its pulses.

By now you’ve no doubt seen the first batch of images from NASA’s powerful new James Webb Space Telescope. But the scope of the achievement is hard to appreciate without context, so here they are side-by-side with Hubble’s views of the same regions.

The greatest space photography competition in the universe has revealed its 2022 shortlist and its nothing short of spectacular – from a stunning moonrise over an ancient tower to a glimpse of the Milky Way above the highest motorway in the world.

Scientists debate whether or not there’s life on Venus. A new Cambridge study has analyzed the Venusian atmosphere and found no sign of the chemical fingerprints microbes would be expected to produce – but it doesn’t rule out life on similar planets.

Astronomers have discovered bizarre “blue blobs” in space. These blobs are clusters of young, blue stars that are isolated from any parent galaxy, suggesting they formed from a galactic “belly flop.”

The most comprehensive picture of the Milky Way just got more detailed. Gaia's third data release covers almost 2 billion stars, including their makeup and movements, plus new catalogs of starquakes, binary systems, variable stars and other objects.

A six-year round trip to an asteroid has yielded unprecedented insights into the formation of the solar system. Scientists have analyzed samples returned from asteroid Ryugu, finding a detailed history starting with the oldest material ever found.