Galaxies

How do astronomers find the darkest objects in the universe?

As the Event Horizon Telescope pursues ambitious upgrades, the project’s latest results reveal the magnetic fields around our galaxy’s supermassive black hole

The ocean’s twice-daily rise and fall is only the most obvious effect of tides—they slow Earth’s spin and shape stars and galaxies, too

Figuring out whether there are more stars in the universe than sand grains on Earth’s seashores requires math—and imagination

Polarized light from Sagittarius A*, our galaxy’s supermassive black hole, shows swirling magnetic fields that may hint at the presence of an unseen jet

The Chandra X-ray Observatory faces a premature end under new funding cuts proposed by NASA—and astronomers aren’t happy

The scale of the cosmos exceeds the bounds of human comprehension. But that doesn’t mean the universe is beyond our understanding

The next year of science for the James Webb Space Telescope has been selected. It includes remote galaxy observations and, at last, a hunt for exomoons

A new catalog of more than 12,000 galaxy clusters is helping scientists better understand the universe’s clumpiness, dark energy and some of the smallest particles in the cosmos: neutrinos

Some of the faintest objects ever observed suggest that small galaxies were responsible for clearing the “fog” pervading the early cosmos

Scientists have proposed a new way to learn whether hypothetical particles called axions really exist—and whether axions make up most of the universe’s dark matter

The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) will open a new era in astronomy that brings scientists to the brink of studying gravitational waves from the beginning of time