Scientists using BOSS, the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey, have used a new mapping technique to probe the period before dark energy began to speed up the expansion of the universe.
Astronomers have discovered their most distant - and therefore oldest - galaxy yet, using NASA's Spitzer and Hubble space telescopes as well as gravitational lensing.
In an X-ray image looking further into the past than ever before, NASA astronomers have discovered that massive black holes were common in the early universe and grew much more aggressively than previously thought.
Scientists have created the biggest ever 3D map of the distant universe, using the light from 14,000 supermassive black holes, or quasars, at the centers of galaxies billions of light years away.
The first stars in the universe may have spun at over a million miles per hour, astronomers at the Leibniz-Institut für Astrophysik Potsdam (AIP) and the Instituto Nazionale di Astrofisica (INAF) say.
