The journey of the elements starts in the earliest moments of the Big Bang, when our universe was only a few seconds to a few minutes old.

The two most common elements in the universe make up much less than 1 percent of the Earth between them.

After its “birth” in the Big Bang, the universe consisted mainly of hydrogen and a few helium atoms. These are the lightest elements in the periodic table. More-or-less all elements heavi ...

Richard Feynman, a famous theoretical physicist who won the Nobel Prize, said that if he could pass on only one piece of ...

Analysis of two major cosmic blasts deepens the mystery of where the universe’s ‘heavy’ elements come from.

Three undergraduate students in an astronomy class at MIT, led by their professor, discovered something extraordinary on the edge of our own galaxy, the Milky Way (so, in cosmic scales, right next ...

The synthesis of the first elements—hydrogen, helium and lithium—occurred roughly three minutes after the birth of the universe.

One of the common misconceptions about black holes is that they not only swallow matter, but also the history of that matter.

The hydrogen comes from the primordial fire of the Big Bang and is by far the most common element. Oxygen is created in the cores of large stars, along with carbon and nitrogen, as part of the CNO ...