The flat Earth conspiracy may not hold all that much water, but the universe might indeed be a lot flatter than you think. The idea of a geometrically flat, infinite universe is backed by Einstein's ...

Nearby, the stars and galaxies we see look very much like our own. But as we look farther away, we see the Universe as it was in the distant past: less structured, hotter, younger, and less evolved.

The observable universe is 92 billion light-years across and contains trillions of galaxies. Telescopes can only show us the observable universe; we can't see beyond it. The universe's shape is ...

It is a routine emotion in 2019 to urgently wish, four or five times in a day, to be launched not simply into space but to the very edge of the universe, as far as it is possible to get from the fever ...

13.8 billion years ago, the Universe as we know it began with the hot Big Bang. Over that time, space itself has expanded, the matter has undergone gravitational attraction, and the result is the ...

Does the universe have an end or an edge? Scientists cannot definitively answer this question, but they have ideas, theories, and measurements to discuss. This question about the boundaries of the ...

Paul Sutter is an astrophysicist at The Ohio State University and the chief scientist at COSI Science Center. Sutter is also host of the podcasts Ask a Spaceman and RealSpace, and the YouTube series ...

As Douglas Adams perfectly summarized in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, “Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is.” In fact, space is so ...

This story originally appeared in the December issue of Discover magazine as "Is the Universe Infinite?" Support our science journalism by becoming a subscriber. When Galileo Galilei pointed his first ...

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