So asking, " Where's the center of the universe? " is somewhat like asking, "Where's the center of the balloon's surface?” There simply isn’t one. You could travel along the surface of the balloon in any direction, for as long as you like, and you'd never once reach a place you could call its center because you’d never actually leave the surface.

If the universe started from a single explosion, where’s the middle? As it turns out, space doesn’t work that way. In this episode, we unpack the most misunderstood aspect of modern cosmology: the origin of everything—and why it’s not located anywhere in particular.

Dark matter remains one of science's deepest mysteries. It makes up about 25% of our universe, yet scientists only observe its gravitational effects.

For one, scientists observe a "cosmic fossil" called the cosmic microwave background (CMB). The first light that was free to travel the universe, the CMB, is a field of radiation that almost evenly and uniformly fills the entire cosmos.

Celestial objects known as dark dwarfs may be hiding at the center of our galaxy and could offer key clues to uncover the nature of one of the most mysterious and fundamental phenomena in contemporary cosmology: dark matter.

Decades ago, astronomers estimated that “ordinary” matter (basically everything that isn’t dark matter or dark energy) makes up 5% of the universe. There was just one problem—they had no idea where most of it was.

Astrophysicists suggest our galaxy may lie inside a "cosmic void" - offering a new explanation for the universe’s conflicting expansion rate.

Earth and our entire Milky Way galaxy may sit inside a mysterious giant hole which makes the cosmos expand faster here than in neighboring regions of the universe, astronomers say.

Supernovae like these are very luminous and referred to as "standard candles" in astronomy. As fixed points, they are used to measure the expansion of the universe, but there are a lot more of them than current theories would predict, and new data could explain why.