If you'd like to "bake" a universe, you need two essential ingredients and one optional ingredient.

New research shows how a hypothetical form of dark energy might be made inside the sun and could be detected here on Earth. In fact, we may have already seen it.

The supermassive black hole in the center of our galaxy may not be a black hole at all, but rather a fluffy ball of dark matter called darkinos.

Space is big — really big. And if you want to successfully navigate the interstellar depths of our galaxy, you're going to need some sort of reliable system.

Many theories of the early universe predict that the cosmos should be flooded with cracks in space-time, called cosmic strings, but no cosmic strings have been detected yet.

For decades, cosmologists have wondered if the large-scale structure of the universe is a fractal — that is, if it looks the same no matter how large the scale.

What's beyond the known limits? What lies outside the boundary of the universe? The answer is … well, it's complicated.

Physicists have long been unable to describe what happened just after the Big Bang when a teensy blip ballooned into the universe, a process called inflation. We may know why.

For years, astronomers thought that the objects responsible for short gamma-ray bursts get kicked out of their home galaxies shortly after they're born. But new observations prove otherwise.

Galaxies are glittering cities, massive metropolises full of stars, dust, gas, black holes, magnetic fields, cosmic rays, dark matter and more.

What if one mission could study the gravitational ripples triggered by some of the most violent events in the universe — on the way to observing the least-known planets of our solar system?

Believe it or not, physicists are attempting to understand the universe when it was only a handful of seconds old.

The hypothetical Planet Nine may not be a planet but rather a small black hole that might be detectable from the theoretical radiation emitted from its edge, so-called Hawking radiation.

A team of physicists has proposed a clever plan to concoct a quantum theory of gravity: refine an age-old technique, and use it to probe the tiniest scales in the universe.

Black holes may not be black or holes, a new theory proposes.

New research suggests a way to move heat around "tidally locked" alien planets: ocean currents whipping around the worlds faster than they rotate.

Astrophysicists have a wild idea to explain the bizarre abundance of super-high-energy radiation shooting from the center of our galaxy: gravity portals.

A weird, super-powerful particle that's not truly a particle could have dominated the universe when it was just a second old, releasing a flood of ripples that permeated all of space-time.

It turns out we don't really understand habitable zones.

We don't know why the universe is dominated by matter over antimatter, but there could be entire stars, and maybe even galaxies, in the universe made of antimatter.

The universe may be filled with "mirror" particles — and these otherwise-undetectable particles could be shrinking the densest stars in the universe, turning them into black holes.

Astronomers have long wondered where high-energy cosmic rays come from within our galaxy. And now, new observations reveal an unlikely candidate: an otherwise mundane giant molecular cloud.

A mysterious "kick" in the early universe may have produced more matter than antimatter. And that imbalance may have also led to the creation of dark matter, researchers now say.

Where did the ingredients for life on Earth come from? A team of astronomers has found a crucial new link: the observation of essential "prebiotic" molecules around a still-forming star.