Universe

A “disappearing” star in the Andromeda galaxy is the closest and best candidate for a newborn black hole that astronomers have ever seen

You might think galaxies can’t ever find each other in our runaway cosmos, but it turns out gravity can sometimes overcome even the stretching of space itself

Dating to only a billion years after the big bang, JADES-ID1 may be the earliest, most distant galaxy protocluster astronomers have ever seen

Astronomers puzzled out minuscule distortions in images of faraway galaxies taken by JWST in order to chart the invisible

From planet-scorching stellar outbursts to cataclysms so powerful they shiver the very fabric of spacetime, these are some of the biggest blasts our cosmos has to offer

A fresh look at the Helix Nebula captures new details of the cycle of stellar life and death

The James Webb Space Telescope should soon be able to spot the first generation of stars in space

Puzzling red spots in images from the James Webb Space Telescope are probably young supermassive black holes obscured by dense cocoons of gas

Record-breaking objects can tell us about the most powerful events in the cosmos—sometimes

New experiments show how RNA might form not just on Earth but on other rocky planets, too

In our topsy-turvy universe, sometimes the farther away an object is, the bigger it seems to be

Although these findings from JWST are yet to be confirmed, they mark the closest astronomers have come to locating the universe’s most ancient stars