Cosmology
Cosmology
365 articles in this category.
Cosmology
For nearly three decades, standard cosmology has treated dark energy as a constant. Now a unified catalogue of 2,884 exploding stars, combined with maps of galaxies and the Big Bang’s afterglow, has added another significant hint that dark energy changes over time—and may be weakening as the universe ages.
Cosmology
Astronomers used 69 fast radio bursts as cosmic backlights to complete the clearest census yet of the universe’s missing ordinary matter, finding that roughly 76% resides as extremely diffuse ionized gas in the vast spaces between galaxies — while only 9% remains inside galaxies as stars and gas.
Cosmology
Since 1908 an observatory outside Paris has photographed the Sun on almost every clear day, pausing only for the First World War. The collection contains more than 120,000 images, and one staff member led a twenty-year effort to digitize its plates and film into a public archive.
Cosmology
NASA's Cassini spacecraft circled Saturn for 13 years and never saw a shape at the south pole, but when the planet's slow seasons tilted that pole back toward Earth, a giant ten-sided figure was waiting there — and it had not existed while the probe was watching
Cosmology
In November 2025, astronomers argued that an overlooked age bias in supernova measurements meant the universe had already begun decelerating and dark energy was weakening. A Southampton-led team challenged that conclusion in June 2026, saying the supposed bias was largely already corrected for—but the original researchers have since disputed the rebuttal.
Cosmology
Venus comes nearer to Earth than any other planet, yet averaged over time the closest planet to Earth is Mercury — and by the same arithmetic Mercury is also the closest planet to Neptune, because a body hugging the Sun can never wander far from anyone
Cosmology
Kepler stared at the same 150,000 stars in Cygnus for four years without looking away, watching for the tiny dimming of a planet crossing in front of them, and the four years of staring turned up more than 2,600 confirmed worlds
Cosmology
The universe’s total mass-energy budget, according to standard cosmology: 4.9% ordinary matter, 26.8% dark matter and 68.3% dark energy — meaning everything made from the atoms on the periodic table accounts for less than one-twentieth of the cosmos.
Aerospace
The highest-resolution images ever taken of the Sun's surface revealed whirlpools of plasma only 20 kilometres wide — the same instability that curls ocean waves and Jupiter's clouds — and it may explain why the Sun's outer atmosphere runs a million degrees hotter than the surface beneath it.
Aerospace
During the total solar eclipse of July 8, 1842, an astronomer watched the ground itself start to ripple — thin bands of light chasing each other across open earth in the last seconds before the sky went fully dark, and 184 years later, nobody has proven why
Cosmology
NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, launching on a Falcon Heavy on 30 August 2026, carries a mirror the size of Hubble's but sees a patch of sky about a hundred times wider, built mainly to map dark energy and hunt for planets
Cosmology
When the James Webb telescope peers into space, it sees not just far away but far back in time: its images catch galaxies as they were just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, more than 13 billion years ago
Cosmology
What did astronomers find when they aimed a telescope at a patch of sky that looked completely empty and left it there for ten days?
Cosmology
We tend to think dark energy has always pushed the universe outward at the same steady rate, but a 2025 survey of 13.1 million galaxies found it appears to have been stronger for the first nine billion years, then began weakening around 4.5 billion years ago
Cosmology