Cosmology

Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have discovered an object they've dubbed 'Big Wheel,' a gargantuan galaxy spinning through the early universe and growing larger by the second.

Scientists have made the record-breaking detection of oxygen in an ancient galaxy that existed just 300 million years after the Big Bang. The detection is prompting astronomers to rethink how quickly stars and galaxies formed in the young universe.

Dark energy, the mysterious phenomenon that powers the expansion of the universe, may undergo periodic 'violent transitions' that reverse the growth of the cosmos, a new pre-print study hints.

A new study suggests that water first appeared in the universe just a couple hundred million years after the Big Bang — meaning life could have evolved billions of years earlier than previously thought.

The most powerful cosmic rays in the universe currently have no explanation. New research suggests that exotic, self-annihilating particles in our own galaxy may hold the answer.

Einstein predicted the existence of gravitationally-warped rings of light in 1915. Now, a new one has been discovered just a cosmic stone's throw from our own planet.

"This process is like a cosmic CT scan, where we can look through different slices of cosmic history and track how matter clumped together at different epochs."

A new study suggests that the explosive deaths of the universe's earliest stars created surprising quantities of water that may have sparked extraterrestrial life in the very first galaxies.

The new composite image, which combines hundreds of photos from the Hubble Space Telescope, shows the Andromeda Galaxy with more than 200 million individually resolved stars.

Astronomers have been confounded by recent evidence that the universe expanded at different rates throughout its life. New findings risk turning the tension into a crisis, scientists say.