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Why Can’t We Find Planet Nine?
Astronomers suspect that there’s a large planet hiding out in the distant fringes of the solar system. At a recent workshop, they brainstormed ways to coax it into view.
The Young Milky Way Collided With a Dwarf Galaxy
Astronomers have found stars dating from a long-ago collision between the Milky Way and another galaxy. The crash helps to explain why the Milky Way looks the way it does.
The Universe Is Not a Simulation, but We Can Now Simulate It
Computer simulations have become so accurate that cosmologists can now use them to study dark matter, supermassive black holes and other mysteries of the real evolving cosmos.
Victoria Meadows’ Earthly Visions of Alien Life
A living, breathing garden in Seattle serves as the perfect backdrop to an astrobiologist’s search for life on faraway planets.
Stellar Disks Reveal How Planets Get Made
Detailed images of disks swirling around young stars show the details of how solar systems come to be.
What Astronomers Are Learning From Gaia’s New Milky Way Map
A roundup of some of the most important discoveries gleaned so far from the Gaia space observatory’s new map of the galaxy.
A Radically Conservative Solution for Cosmology’s Biggest Mystery
Two ways of measuring the universe’s expansion rate yield two conflicting answers. Many point to the possibility of new physics at work, but a new analysis argues that unseen errors could be to blame.
A Revealer of Secrets in the Data of Life and the Universe
The statistician Donald Richards lives to uncover subtle patterns hiding in real-world data.
A Victory for Dark Matter in a Galaxy Without Any
Paradoxically, a small galaxy that seems to contain none of the invisible stuff known as “dark matter” may help prove that it exists.