The universe is so unimaginably large that parts of it are literally impossible to see, because their light is too distant to reach us even after 14 billion years. Now we might know just how big the ...

In 1929, Edwin Hubble discovered from observations of distant galaxies that the Universe was expanding. This baffled astronomers and the public alike. Then in 1998, another wrinkle: Two different ...

Astronomers have used all sorts of tricks over the years to try to convey the mind-boggling scale of the universe to us ordinary folks. If you could drive your car from here to the nearest star at 60 ...

The visible cosmos may contain roughly 6 x 10^80 — or 600 million trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion — bits of information, according to a new estimate. The findings could have ...

In the history of this humble little star-watching column, I've thrown a myriad of numbers at you about the sizes of the stars and planets visible in our night sky and the tremendous distances between ...

It’s hard to fathom the size of the universe. But two Stony Brook University professors are part of a project designed to do just that — an effort scientists say is making advances. Researchers in the ...

Astronomers analyzing Sloan Digital Sky Survey data stumbled onto something they weren’t expecting: a structure stretching ...

When we say that the something is big—be it the visible universe or a human brain—we have to ask: Compared with what? The natural point of reference is the scope of everyday human life. This is the ...