Astronomy

Astronomers are preparing for a new era of big-data astronomy, and results are already starting to arrive.

Microscopic crystals extracted from meteorites could help settle a debate about the birth of our patch of the Milky Way.

Today’s observatories document every pulse and flash in the sky each night. To understand how the cosmos has changed over longer periods, scientists rely on a more tactile technology.

A team of scientists has investigated how Earth’s twin became so inhospitable, and whether the same will happen to our planet.

The James Webb Space Telescope has found a lonely black hole in the early universe that’s as heavy as 50 million suns. A major discovery, the object confounds theories of the young cosmos.

Tony Tyson’s cameras revealed the universe’s dark contents. Now, with the Rubin Observatory’s 3.2-billion-pixel camera, he’s ready to study dark matter and dark energy in unprecedented detail.

The precursors of heavy elements might arise in the plasma underbellies of swollen stars or in smoldering stellar corpses. They definitely exist in East Lansing, Michigan.

Recent flybys of the fiery world refute a leading theory of its inner structure — and reveal how little is understood about geologically active moons.

Astronomers are ready to search for the fingerprints of life in faraway planetary atmospheres. But first, they need to know where to look — and that means figuring out which planets are likely to have atmospheres in the first place.