Paul Sutter

You may have heard about the "cosmology crisis:" Different methods of measuring the age of the universe are giving different results, and cosmologists have no idea why.

Toxic hydrogen cyanide gas, used in chemical weapons today, may have been involved in the early stages of life's evolution, a new study suggests.

It's easy enough to say what a star is: one of those bright pointy things that twinkle in the night sky. But the actual definition of a star is as rich and colorful as the stars themselves.

The universe is pretty good at smashing things together. And when neutron stars do it, the collisions release a flood of elements necessary for life.

Astronomers have proposed lots of ideas to explain 'Oumuamua's odd characteristics, and we're unlikely ever to find out which one is correct.

Knowing if high-energy neutrinos and FRBs came from the same place on the sky would help explain the origins of both. But alas, they do not.

How do you test theories of the universe? By building gigantic supercomputers and simulating the evolution of the cosmos.

Does the simulation hypothesis offer a compelling argument, or is it just interesting food for thought? Let's find out.

How common are ice-covered planets like Hoth from "Star Wars," and might they be capable of hosting life? As usual, the answer is, it depends.

The Pacific Ocean Neutrino Experiment would turn a massive swath of the Pacific Ocean into nature's own neutrino detector.

Wormholes may be stable after all, a new theory suggests, contradicting previous predictions that these hypothetical shortcuts through space-time would instantly collapse.

Hiding beneath the outer layers of some planets, there may be something spectacular: a constant rain of diamonds.

The recently launched James Webb Telescope should help determine if dark matter is made up of primordial black holes.

Now that the telescope is in space, what's next for astrophysics done from beyond Earth's surface? Here are five future missions to get excited about.

A multiverse may be a natural prediction of the physical theories that define the beginning of the universe.

Humans have scanned and searched the heavens for signs of other advanced civilizations in the universe. And we've found nothing. Absolutely nothing. Maybe we shouldn't focus on intelligent life.

The world could end not with a bang, but with a quantum vacuum decay of the ground state of the universe to its true minimum.

The formation of the solar system is a challenging puzzle for modern astronomy and a terrific tale of extreme forces operating over immense timescales. Let's dig in.

In a recent study, researchers determined that about 1% of all the "normal" (that is, not dark) matter in the universe is bound up inside black holes.

Since 2014, there have been over 300 proposals for solutions to the "crisis in cosmology." None of these proposals is universally agreed upon by cosmologists, and the crisis just keeps getting worse.

The elements around some giant black holes may be subtly different from the cosmic average, retaining a relic memory of the young universe.

If scientists want astronomy to thrive throughout the 21st century, we need a new approach: to view new observatories through a lens of public benefit.