Space, Cosmos | featured news

A $2 billion experiment on the International Space Station is on the verge of explaining one of the more mysterious building blocks of the universe: The dark matter that helps hold the cosmos together....

A subatomic particle discovered last year that may be the long-sought Higgs boson might doom our universe to an unfortunate end, researchers say. The mass of the particle, which was uncovered at the world's largest particle accelerator — the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva — is a key ingredient in a calculation that portends the future of space and time.

Science editor Alan Boyle's blog: The best way for most of us to watch asteroid 2012 DA14 come within 17,200 miles of Earth, and then recede harmlessly into the cosmos, is to watch the show online.

That wonder molecule of life on Earth, DNA, is now being enlisted in the search for an exotic species zooming through the cosmos: dark matter... As far back as the 1930s, astronomers watching distant galaxies saw that something was missing: There were not enough stars to account for the heavy gravity needed to whirl galaxies so quickly or smash them together so swiftly.

The more astronomers look for other worlds, the more they find that it's a crowded and crazy cosmos. They think planets easily outnumber stars in our galaxy and they're even finding them in the strangest of places... "We're finding an exciting potpourri of things we didn't even think could exist," said Harvard University astronomer Lisa Kaltenegger, including planets that mirror "Star Wars" Luke Skywalker's home planet with twin suns and a mini-star system with a dwarf sun and shrunken planets.