Although our Universe may seem stable, having existed for a whopping 13.7 billion years, several experiments suggest that it is at risk - walking on the edge of a very dangerous cliff.
According to data from the Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes, the origins of the free-flying photons in the early cosmic dawn were small dwarf galaxies that flared to life, clearing the fog of murky hydrogen that filled intergalactic space.
This observation suggests exciting avenues of investigation into both the production of cosmic dust and the earliest stellar populations in our Universe, and was made possible by Webb’s unprecedented sensitivity.
Scientists have for the first time observed the early universe running in extreme slow motion, unlocking one of the mysteries of Einstein's expanding universe.
New results from the James Webb Space Telescope find that radiation from ordinary galaxies cleared the primordial haze left over from the Big Bang, allowing the first light to shine through the early universe.
There could have been two scenarios with the two Big Bangs. The Hot Big Bang, as in the standard picture, creates the hot plasma of visible matter and radiation and the dark matter, however, could have been created in a later, ‘darker’ Big Bang.
A powerful European Ariane 5 rocket boosted NASA’s $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope into space on Christmas Day, kicking off a great attempt to capture light from the first galaxies to form in the aftermath of the Big Bang.
For the first time, scientists have measured the lifespan of a neutron in the void of space. This could help us to better understand how quickly elements formed out of the particle soup that filled the Universe just after the Big Bang.
For the first time, researchers have documented the long-predicted occurrence of 'walls bound by strings' in superfluid helium-3. The existence of such an object may explain how the universe cooled down.
A relic cloud of gas, orphaned after the Big Bang, has been discovered in the distant universe by astronomers using the world's most powerful optical telescope, the W. M. Keck Observatory on Maunakea, Hawaii.
The discovery of this approximately 13.5 billion-year-old tiny star means more stars with very low mass and very low metal content are likely out there—perhaps even some of the universe's very first stars.
The Planck mission launched in 2009 has finally reached its ending point. So far the standard model of cosmology has survived all the tests.
Astronomers have observed a galaxy 13.3 billion light years away that includes stars that must have been shining just 250 million years after the Big Bang.
The theory, which was submitted for publication before Hawking's death earlier this year, is based on string theory and predicts the universe is finite and far simpler than many current theories about the big bang say.
This black hole resides in a luminous quasar and its light reaches us from when the Universe was only 5 percent of its current age — just 690 million years after the Big Bang.
