Even when you remove the bright stars, the glowing dust and other nearby points of light from the inky, dark sky, a background glow remains. That glow comes from the cosmic sea of distant galaxies, ...

"The polarized light of the cosmic microwave background is sensitive to new physics that violates parity symmetry," the team ...

New research has unveiled images of the universe in its infancy—a mere 388,000 after the Big Bang. The snaps of the universe were produced by the Atacama Cosmology Telescope collaboration (ACT), which ...

Astronomers have discovered a nearly invisible galaxy called CDG-2, which blends into the cosmic background and is made up of 99% dark matter. Unlike bright galaxies like the Milky Way, CDG-2 barely ...

For decades, astronomers were certain that half of the ordinary matter in the universe — protons and neutrons, the building blocks of everything we see — had simply gone unaccounted for. The cosmic ...

Arecibo Observatory observations of galactic neutral hydrogen structure confirm the discovery of an unexpected contribution to the measurements of the cosmic microwave background observed by the WMAP ...

The Cosmic Background Explorer satellite (COBE) went up on a Delta rocket on Nov. 18, 1989, into a polar sun-synchronous orbit 900 km up. Our team at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), Ball ...

Repulsive gravity at the quantum scale would have flattened out inhomogeneities in the early universe First light The cosmic microwave background, as imaged by the European Space Agency’s Planck ...

As black as space may seem, even the darkest corner of the universe gets light. Measuring that tiny glimmer — called the cosmic optical background (COB) — sheds light on the energy balance of the ...

Scientists are reeling from an unexpected blow after news that a much anticipated future observatory—designed to decipher the earliest moments of cosmic history—won’t be able to proceed with its ...

The events surrounding the Big Bang were so cataclysmic that they left an indelible imprint on the fabric of the cosmos. We can detect these scars today by observing the oldest light in the universe.