The oxygen in a galaxy does not sit still. It spreads, thins out, piles up, and leaves behind a record of where stars formed, where gas moved, and when smaller galaxies crashed in. In the nearby spiral galaxy NGC 1365, astronomers have now read that record in unusual detail, using oxygen as a kind of fossil trail.

Here’s a question that sounds simple but has kept cosmologists arguing for decades – how old is the universe? You’d think we’d have nailed this down by now. We’ve sent spacecraft to the edges of the Solar System, photographed galaxies billions of light years away, and detected ripples in the very fabric of spacetime itself. And yet, depending on which method you use to measure the universe’s age, you get a different answer and those answers seem to contradict each other.

Astronomers have used a collection of telescopes to peer through the gas and dust obscuring the center of the Milky Way to reveal the enigmatic Central Molecular Zone. This is a region 650 light-years in diameter filled with a complex network of filaments made of dense clouds of gas. A new image shows how cold molecular gas flows along these filaments to feed into clumps where new stars are born in the Milky Way’s most extreme environment.

Between May 2023 and January 2024, a global network of gravitational-wave detectors picked up 128 new cosmic signals, more than doubling the entire catalog built across the previous decade. The universe, it turns out, is not quiet. It is constantly shaking.

A single particle cut through the Mediterranean in February 2023 carrying an almost absurd amount of energy. Detected deep off the coast of Sicily by the KM3NeT/ARCA neutrino telescope, the neutrino clocked in at about 220 petaelectronvolts, making it the most energetic neutrino ever recorded.