Universe

The International Dark-Sky Association is a non-profit dedicated to safeguarding night skies for future generations to enjoy, and has just granted its first designation that covers an entire country, the small Pacific island nation of Niue.

Few things are as mysterious as dark matter. Now, a physicist from Johns Hopkins University has outlined a new theory that helps to explain the stuff but at the same time makes it seem even more bizarre. According to the study, dark matter may have originated before the Big Bang.

Our home galaxy is right on the border of a void so vast it’s hard to picture. To get a better idea of its shape and size, a team of astronomers has mapped out the edges of this extragalactic emptiness, and calculated just how much gravitational influence it has on the Milky Way.

To look through space is to look through time. Astronomers on a 5-years survey have turned up 100 supermassive black holes from a time when they were thought to be rare, suggesting we might need to rewrite our understanding of their evolution.

A NASA-led citizen scientist project has discovered an ancient white dwarf that’s surrounded by large rings, which is shaking up our understanding of how these systems form.

NASA has selected the newest space mission for its Explorer program: the Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer (SPHEREx). The spacecraft will search for the ingredients of life in the Milky Way, and peer as far as 10 billion years back in time.

An astrophysicist from Oxford has put forward a new theory that suggests that dark matter and dark energy are actually part of the same phenomenon: a “dark fluid” with negative mass that fills the universe.

Astronomers have now asked “how much light has been emitted in the universe?” Using a new measurement method, the team has apparently managed to quantify all the starlight ever produced in the observable universe – and the result is a figure that’ll make your eyes water.

Astronomers have identified one of the oldest stars ever found, which appears to be just one generation removed from the beginning of the universe itself. Being relatively close to Earth, the find could mean our galactic neighborhood is much older than previously thought.

The results of a new study suggest that a number of small satellite galaxies orbiting the Milky Way are actually some of the first to come into existence following the creation of the universe.

An international team of astronomers has completed the most comprehensive ultraviolet survey of the local universe to date, with the help of the Hubble Space Telescope. The survey could help scientists better understand how stars come to form, and how galaxies like our own evolve over time.

Our universe seems to contain a suspiciously perfect amount of "dark energy" to sustain life. But new research suggests that life is still possible even with far more dark energy than we have, and the results have some big implications for the multiverse theory.