WMAP Resolves the Universe
12.02.2003

Analyses of a new high-resolution map of microwave light emitted only 380,000 years after the Big Bang appear to define our universe more precisely than ever before. The eagerly awaited results from the orbiting Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe resolve several long-standing disagreements in cosmology rooted in less precise data.

NGC 5584: Expanding the Universe
30.03.2011

Big, beautiful NGC 5548 is more that 50,000 light-years across and lies 72 million light-years away toward the constellation Virgo. The winding spiral arms of this gorgeous island universe are loaded with luminous young star clusters and dark dust lanes. Still, for earthbound astronomers NGC 5548 is not just another pretty face-on spiral galaxy.

A Flight Through the Universe
13.08.2012

What would it be like to fly through the universe? Possibly the best simulated video of this yet has been composed from recently-released galaxy data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Every spot in the above video is a galaxy containing billions of stars.

A Year of Resolving Backgrounds
30.12.2000

No matter which direction you look, no matter what type of light you see, the sky glows - but why? The sources of many of these background radiations have remained long-standing puzzles, but this millennial year brought some partial resolutions.

APOD: 2023 November 8 Б Perseus Galaxy Cluster from Euclid
8.11.2023

There's a new space telescope in the sky: Euclid. Equipped with two large panoramic cameras, Euclid captures light from the visible to the near-infrared. It took five hours of observing for Euclid...

Microwave Hotspots: The Oldest Structures Known
29.10.2000

These spots are the oldest, most distant structures known. They are seen on the above two images of the microwave sky, north and south of our galaxy's equator, based on four-year's worth of data from NASA's COsmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite (1989-1993). The spots represent temperature variations in the early universe.

Dark Matter Movie from the Bolshoi Simulation
3.10.2011

What if you could fly through the universe and see dark matter? While the technology for taking such a flight remains under development, the technology for visualizing such a flight has taken a grand leap forward with the completion of the Bolshoi Cosmological Simulation.

The Year of Distant Supernovae
31.12.1998

Distant supernovae were among topics at the forefront of astronomy during 1998. Two independent groups raced to deploy large telescopes to scan the sky, discovering and analyzing far-off supernovae with the promise of calibrating the geometry of our universe.

Huge Void Implicated in Distant Universe
27.08.2007

What has created this huge empty area in the universe? No one is yet sure, and even the extent of the estimated billion-light year void is being researched. The void is not a hole...

Galaxy Cluster Abell 1689 Magnifies the Dark Universe
24.08.2010

What's the matter with this cluster of galaxies? To find out what forms matter takes in the Abell 1689 cluster requires not only deep images from telescopes like the Hubble Space Telescope, but detailed computer modeling as well. To start, almost every fuzzy yellow patch in the above image is an entire galaxy.