An astrophysicist sits down with Nautilus to discuss cosmology and culture.

Given how absurdly vast the cosmos is, with its hundreds of billions of galaxies, picturing it isn’t easy. You might think it natural, for instance, to see all these galaxies as more or less evenly spread out across the Universe. But you’d be wrong. Following the Big Bang, 13.8 billion years ago, says Robert Kirshner, […]

In a mere 60 years, we of Earth have gone from launching our first spacecraft, to exploring every planet and major moon in our solar system, to establishing an international, long-lived fleet of robotic spacecraft at the Moon and Mars. What will we do in the next 100 years? With such rapid expansion of capability, […]

The universe’s greatest sinkholes have no trouble swallowing anything—except themselves.

Eight foundational images from the archives of the Carnegie Observatories.

The Dragonfly telescope is pushing the boundaries of small-scale observational astronomy.