universe

An L-shaped machine in Louisiana is hunting for some of the most powerful waves in existence: gravitational waves. This wave detector acts like a giant tape measure to capture bends in space and time.

To make enough of the elements to support the chemical complexity of biology, we need an enormously old universe. Stars truly are the factories of life. But for you or your cat to exist, several generations of stars need to have come and gone - each born from the atoms of previous generations, like the babies of the Orion Nebula.

To make enough of the elements to support the chemical complexity of biology, we need an enormously old universe. Stars truly are the factories of life. But for you or your cat to exist, several generations of stars need to have come and gone - each born from the atoms of previous generations, like the babies of the Orion Nebula.

Astronomers have found about 2,000 planets beyond our solar system. Now, some scientists are expanding the search to look for distant moons, too, in the hunt for signs of life.

A black hole with about 17 billion times the mass of our sun has turned up in another remote galaxy. Astronomers now think these mass-eating monsters may not be so rare after all.

It's 200 times more powerful than a typical supernova and 570 billion times brighter than our sun. First spotted in June, this stellar monster is wowing astronomers, who wonder what's at its heart.

Amid this week's hoopla celebrating the Hubble Space Telescope, don't forget the clever astronomer for whom the space scope was named. In the 1920s, he changed our sense of ourselves and the universe.