We’ve misunderstood the universe

New model suggests Hawking radiation is speeding cosmic decay Scientists have long predicted that the Universe’s lifetime is effectively forever – specifically, 101100 years. But now scientists from R

f you’ve ever read anything about cosmology, you’ll have come across an astonishing statistic: all the matter around us, everything we see and touch, every star and gas cloud and planet, makes up just

On 23 July 1999, Space Shuttle Columbia launched its heaviest-ever payload: the Chandra X-ray Observatory, a new flagship telescope for NASA. It is the world’s most powerful X-ray telescope, capable o

The difficulty in creating a theory of ‘quantum gravity’ is that the two ideas look at the Universe at completely different scales. Quantum mechanics looks at the smallest scales of the particles that

Galaxies come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. They can be broadly classified as spiral, elliptical or irregular, but each of these still leaves plenty of scope for variety. Take, for instance, the s

The world’s biggest digital camera telescope has started ...