Cosmos Portal: The Universe
The Universe is by definition everything that physically exists in space and time. It originated in the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago. The radius of the Universe is at least 78 billion light years. That is the distance to the point from which a photon of light originated which is now reaching us after traveling for 13.7 billion years. However the Universe could be far larger. There is no limit to the speed at which space itself may expand, so the Universe may stretch far beyond the Hubble horizon expanding away from us faster than the speed of light. It is also conjectured that our Universe may be only one of 10500 other universes which may have totally different laws of nature and which are collectively called a multiverse.
Featured Resource
Atlas of the Universe
This web page is designed to give everyone an idea of what our universe actually looks like. There are nine main maps on this web page, each one approximately ten times the scale of the previous one. The first map shows the nearest stars and then...
Latest News
Is Our Universe at Home Within a Larger Universe?
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. (April 5, 2010) – Could our universe be located within the interior of a wormhole which itself is part of a black hole that lies within a much larger universe? Such a...
Articles
The Sun, our solar system's star, has inspired mythological stories in cultures around the world, including th...
Mercury's elliptical orbit takes the small planet as close as 47 million kilometers (29 million miles) and as ...
At first glance, if Earth had a twin, it would be Venus. The two planets are similar in size, mass, compositio...
Mars is a small rocky body once thought to be very Earth-like. Like the other terrestrial planets - Mercury, V...
Kuiper Belt: In 1950, Dutch astronomer Jan Oort proposed that certain comets came from a vast spher...
Introduction After Percival Lowell established his Flagstaff observatory and published three books on Mars, it...
A quick tour of the Solar System: From our small world we have gazed upon the cosmic ocean for thousands of ye...
Blog Posts
According to the tagline in Ridley Scotts 1979 blockbuster Alien, In space, no one can hear you scream....
A.k.a. The Digital Universe: Now with 10% more dark energy. Things have been rather frenzied this summer, to s...
The first detection of extrasolar planets was announced in 1995 by two competing groups. One was headed by Geo...
When something exciting was happening and astronomers wanted other astronomers around the world to know, they ...
News Articles
ESO, Garching, Germany (10 Aug. 2011) This new picture from ESOs Very Large Telescope shows NGC 3521, a spir...
Dartmouth College (Aug. 22, 2009) Despite their popularity in the science fiction genre, there is much to ...
Washington (Oct. 28, 2009) During its first year of operations, NASA's Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope map...
ETH, Zurich (Sep. 14, 2009) An unprecedented measuring campaign has succeeded in precisely defining the pl...
Socorro, NM (Oct. 29, 2009) Astronomers using the National Science Foundation's Very Large Array (VLA) rad...
European Space Agency (March 2, 2009) A new Hubble image shows three galaxies locked in a gravitational tu...
NASA, Washington (Oct. 14, 2009) NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer, or IBEX, spacecraft has made it po...
Events
Dear Friend of Astronomy: You are cordially invited to the SETI Institute in Mountain View on Saturday, May...
Dr. Patricia Burchat of Stanford University will give a non-technical, illustrated talk on: The Dark Side ...
October 23rd Evening Star Party at Foothill College: Free and Open to the Public On Friday evening, October 23...
Resources
News about Mars from Science Daily...
The Milky Way galaxy contains several hundred billion stars of various ages, sizes and masses. A star forms wh...- Animated GIF image of Comet Lulin C/2007 N3 from Feb. 23 UT. Images show plume from the ion tail preceeding co...
Are We Alone? podcast A loud radio hiss is coming from the cosmos. Is it the swan song of the first giant star...
While the Kepler spacecraft hunts for habitable planets beyond the solar system, weve let one of our own pl...
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