It’s always amazing, and more than a little humbling, when the universe reminds us that our “common sense” is provincial, ...

James is a published author with multiple pop-history and science books to his name. He specializes in history, space, strange science, and anything out of the ordinary.View full profile James is a ...

Astronomers have used all sorts of tricks over the years to try to convey the mind-boggling scale of the universe to us ordinary folks. If you could drive your car from here to the nearest star at 60 ...

Image: When a large nearby object, such as a galaxy, blocks a distant object, such as another galaxy, the light can detour around the blockage. But instead of taking a single path, light can bend ...

This logarithmic view of the Universe shows our solar system, the galaxy, the cosmic web, and the limits of what's observable out to a distance of 46.1 billion light-years away. This view is only ...

It’s hard to fathom the size of the universe. But two Stony Brook University professors are part of a project designed to do just that — an effort scientists say is making advances. Researchers in the ...

The universe is a big place, and it’s hard to fathom the immense size given our finite ideas of distance here on Earth. Because of this, determining an answer for exactly “how big” is difficult.

Look up on a dark night and the stars seem scattered at random. Step back in scale, though, and the Universe looks nothing ...

The 1920 Shapley-Curtis debate concerned the scale of the universe, with Curtis correctly proposing a universe composed of many galaxies ("island universes"), while Shapley correctly posited the Sun's ...

It's the most fundamental law of special relativity, and the realization that led Einstein to some of the greatest physics breakthroughs of all time: the idea that nothing can travel faster than light ...