Modern cosmology assumes dark matter exists. But what makes us so certain that dark matter is the answer—and what if we're wrong?

In the Big Bend region, a portal to the early universe is enabled by the largest dark-sky reserve on Earth. The Hobby-Eberly Telescope at the McDonald Observatory in Fort Davis, Texas, was used to ...

In a significant milestone, the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) has completed its 3D map of the Universe—the highest resolution of any such map yet achieved—on schedule and with more data ...

Astronomers have long argued that dark matter is the invisible scaffolding that holds galaxies together. Without its immense gravitational pull, the rotational spins of galaxies would force them to ...

Dark energy is one of those cosmological features that we are still learning about. While we can't see it directly, we can most famously observe its effects on the universe—primarily how it is causing ...

After 25 years of planning, six years of data collection, and six more years of analysis, scientists have published a portion of the final results of the Dark Energy Survey (DES) — the largest, most ...

The Dark Energy Survey collaboration is releasing results that, for the first time, combine all of the data from an intensive six-year mapping of galaxies in the universe. The new analysis, of ...

(via Sabine Hossenfelder) Dark matter is a mysterious substance which makes up roughly 85% of the matter in the universe. But physicists have yet to figure out what dark matter actually is. In a new ...

After five years of mapping the sky in 3D — an area that stretches from Earth’s front porch to about 11 billion light-years away — researchers at the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) ...