When faraway stars explode, they send out flashes of energy called gamma-ray bursts that are bright enough that telescopes back on Earth can detect them. Studying these pulses, which can also come ...

When massive stars or other stellar objects explode in the Earth's cosmic neighborhood, ejected debris can also reach our solar system. Traces of such events are found on Earth or the Moon and can be ...

What is the universe made of? This question has driven astronomers for hundreds of years. For the past quarter of a century, scientists have believed “normal” stuff like atoms and molecules that make ...

The new discoveries, based on data from the James Webb Space Telescope, provide a glimpse of the early universe. When a star runs out of fuel, it explodes, as seen in this illustration. Astronomers ...

Whether witnessed in the birth and growth of individual galaxies or in the formation of galaxy clusters and other mind-numbingly enormous cosmic structures—so much of what we see in the cosmos is ...