Large galaxies like the Milky Way formed out of mergers with smaller galaxies and by stealing some of their stars. Astronomers discovered that as many as 25% of galaxies are currently merging with ...

The Milky Way is our galactic home, part of the story of how we came to be. Astronomers have learned that it’s a large spiral galaxy, similar to many others, but also different in ways that reflect ...

At some point early in the history of the universe, the first stars were born. However, we don’t know exactly when that was, or what the first generation of stars looked like. The Large Aperture ...

When a star like our Sun dies, it doesn’t explode into a supernova or collapse into a black hole. Instead, it gently sheds its outer layers, which form a beautiful cloud called a “planetary nebula”, ...

About 13.8 billion years ago, the Big Bang gave rise to everything, everywhere, and everywhen—the entire known Universe. What caused the Big Bang? What happened that first moment at the beginning of ...

Looking for hidden structures and unusual stars that reveal the Milky Way’s history. Since our galaxy grew by merging with and eating other galaxies, traces of that violent past are visible in the ...

Most of the atoms in the universe are either hydrogen or helium, formed within the first few minutes after the Big Bang. The other elements are mostly made by nuclear fusion in stars, especially ...

Matter and energy are the two basic components of the entire Universe. An enormous challenge for scientists is that most of the matter in the Universe is invisible and the source of most of the energy ...

Black holes are some of the most fascinating and mind-bending objects in the cosmos. The very thing that characterizes a black hole also makes it hard to study: its intense gravity. All the mass in a ...

The universe began 13.8 billion years ago, and in its early years, it looked completely different than it does now. For nearly 400,000 years, the entire cosmos was opaque, which means we have no ...

For the first 380,000 years or so after the Big Bang, the entire universe was a hot soup of particles and photons, too dense for light to travel very far. However, as the cosmos expanded, it cooled ...

The Whipple Observatory Science Center is open for the Fall season on select Fridays beginning Friday, October 10, 2025. We are open on the following Fridays in Fall 2025 from 10am-3pm: Exhibits, ...