In 1920, astronomers Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis held a Great Debate. Shapley argued that the spiral nebulae were small and in the Milky Way, while Curtis took a more radical position that they ...

The Milky Way is one of the biggest in the observable universe: Even if you traveled at the speed of light, it would take 100,000 years to go from one end of our home galaxy to the other.

For the next 300 years, astronomers assumed that the Milky Way was the entire universe. Charles Messier also produced a catalog of over 100 prominent nebulae in 1781. Messier was interested in ...

Voluminous clouds of cosmic dust permeate our galaxy, but only recently has software allowed detailed observations of the ...

The James Webb Space Telescope is investigating the Flame Nebula, hunting for "failed stars" to better understand how brown ...

Astronomers discover an 850,000 light-year-long cosmic filament in the early universe, providing insights into large-scale ...

"We thought they were basically all going to be fried because the entire universe turned into a vat of boiling oil." ...

Millions of years ago, our Solar System traveled through a densely populated galactic region and was exposed to increased interstellar dust.

When we observe distant celestial objects, there is a possible catch: Is that star I am observing really as reddish as it ...

The findings, published in Astronomy & Astrophysics ( "The Solar System’s Passage through the Radcliffe Wave during the ...

Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more. Astronomers using ...

Nature of the nebulae In 1610, astronomer Galileo Galilei used the newly invented telescope to show that the Milky Way was composed of a huge number of faint stars. For the next 300 years ...