Baryon Acoustic Oscillations from SDSS III
20.01.2014

How large do things appear when far away? When peering across the universe, the answer can actually tell us about its average gravitational history and hence its composition. Toward this goal, the Baryon Oscillation...

A Year of Resolving Cosmology
30.12.2003

This year, humanity learned that the universe is 13.7 billion years old. Before this year, the universe's age was thought to be about 13 billion years, but really only constrained to be between about 12 billion and 15 billion years old.

The CMB Cold Spot
20.03.2011

How could part of the early universe be so cold? No one is sure, and many astronomers now think that the CMB Cold Spot on the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation is not particularly noteworthy. As the early universe expanded and cooled, it suddenly and predictably became transparent.

Illustration: An Early Quasar
21.02.2022

What did the first quasars look like? The nearest quasars are now known to involve supermassive black holes in the centers of active galaxies. Gas and dust that falls toward a quasar glows brightly, sometimes outglowing the entire home galaxy.

M1: The Crab Nebula
25.07.1995

In the year 1054 a star in the constellation of Taurus exploded in a spectacular supernova so bright it appeared to dominate the sky except for the Sun and Moon for many days. It left behind one of the most brilliant nebulae, listed first in Charles Messier's list of nebulous sky objects.

All of These Space Images are Fake Except One
8.11.2021

Why would you want to fake a universe? For one reason -- to better understand our real universe. Many astronomical projects seeking to learn properties of our universe now start with a robotic telescope taking sequential images of the night sky.

M82: An Irregular Galaxy
28.07.1995

Not all galaxies have spiral structure like our Milky Way. Many have smooth elliptical shapes, but also many have irregular shapes such as the bright sky object M82, the 82nd object on Messier's list.

Antarctica Hears Little Matter in the Big Bang
1.05.2001

On the frozen tundra near the bottom of our world, increasingly sophisticated instruments listen for a more precise echo of how our universe started. Sunday, independent collaborations behind three such instruments announced evidence that...

Breaking Distant Light
18.03.2002

In the distant universe, time appears to run slow. Since time-dilated light appears shifted toward the red end of the spectrum (redshifted), astronomers are able to use cosmological time-slowing to help measure vast distances in the universe.

A Force from Empty Space: The Casimir Effect
17.09.2002

This tiny ball provides evidence that the universe will expand forever. Measuring slightly over one tenth of a millimeter, the ball moves toward a smooth plate in response to energy fluctuations in the vacuum of empty space.