The center of the galaxy is mostly obscure in visible light. But thanks to the world’s most powerful infrared telescope, we can see inside. Throughout history, the sight of the Milky […]

The highest-energy particles on Earth reach enormous energies, but it’s nothing compared to what the Universe can achieve. Deep underground in Europe, the world’s most powerful particle accelerator lives in a […]

From outside a black hole, all masses take an infinite amount of time to cross the event horizon. How, then, can black holes grow? Every Milky Way-sized galaxy should contain hundreds […]

A decade ago, we didn’t know if dwarf galaxies had black holes. Today, half of the ones we see aren’t where we expected. Normally, galaxies have supermassive black holes millions […]

Astronomy’s enduring quest is to go farther, fainter, and more detailed than ever before. Here’s the edge of the cosmic frontier. Astronomers have always sought to push back the viewable […]

A black hole’s event horizon is thought of as the point of no return. But perhaps there are ways back out, after all. Black holes just might be the most extreme […]

The NICER experiment, designed to measure neutron stars as never before, just released their first pulsar map, and it’s amazing. After typical supernovae, remnant collapsed cores of matter are left behind. […]

Even extremely simple configurations in General Relativity cannot be solved exactly. Here’s the science of why. It’s difficult to appreciate how revolutionary of a transformation it is to consider the Universe […]

If this discovery came in a pre-LIGO era, maybe it would have been a surprise. But in 2019, there’s no mystery at all. Did you hear that astronomers had recently […]

Even before MMA was a combat sport, it was a unique type of astronomy. Today, it’s opening up the Universe as never before. On February 24, 1987, a spectacular signal was […]

If you think about the way a gravitational wave detector works, you might encounter a paradox. Here’s the solution. One of the greatest scientific achievements in all of human history […]

100+ years ago, General Relativity came along, and Einstein gave the Universe a cosmological constant. Here’s why that was a mistake. Back in the 17th century, Isaac Newton put forth the […]

It’s much more complex a question than dividing its mass by the volume of the event horizon. If you want to get a meaningful answer, you have to go deep. If […]

Every object in the Universe is constrained by the laws of physics. Does this mean there are any black holes that shouldn’t exist? When it comes to the objects that […]

What’s more massive than the heaviest known neutron star but lighter than the lightest known black hole? LIGO may be about to solve that mystery. Whenever a star is born in […]

You’ve seen a black hole’s event horizon for the first time thanks to them. But they’re only getting started. Earlier this year, 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration revealed the first […]

Black holes are regions of extreme gravity, but dark matter barely interacts at all. Do they play well together? Black holes are some of the most extreme objects in the […]

We’re one step closer to solving the mystery of how they get so big so fast. A great cosmic mystery for science is explaining how supermassive black holes form. An ultra-distant […]

Many of them are spinning at nearly the speed of light. When you do the math, there’s no other way it could have been. Take a look out there at the […]

The dream of multi-messenger astronomy is to seen an event with gravitational waves, neutrinos, and light all together. The newest candidate just might get us there. When it comes to cataclysmic […]

A star orbiting past our galaxy’s supermassive black hole offered a chance to test relativity as never before. The supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way is the […]

The quest for a quantum theory of gravity is the holy grail of physics. Here’s why it’s murkier than anyone expected. If you want to fully describe how the Universe […]

The Planck length is a lot smaller than anything we’ve ever accessed. But is it a true limit? If you wanted to understand how our Universe operates, you’d have to examine […]

Discovered by NASA’s Chandra X-ray observatory, it’s powered by a supermassive black hole. 2019 marks 20 years of NASA’s Chandra, humanity’s most powerful X-ray observatory. Artist illustration of the Chandra X-ray […]

A vacuum cleaner is the wrong picture. Time to bust that myth. There are no classes of object in our Universe more extreme than black holes. With so much mass present […]

An entire Universe of possibilities await stars like our own, even after they run out of fuel. One of the most profound rules in all the Universe is that nothing lasts […]

There aren’t any holes in the Universe at all. What actually exists is far more interesting. Somewhere, far away, if you believe what you read, there’s a hole in the […]

13.8 billion years isn’t close to enough time, but if we wait long enough, even our Sun will become one. The Big Bang happened approximately 13.8 billion years ago, and it […]

It’s made up of scores of telescopes at many different sites across the world. But it acts like one giant telescope. Here’s how. If you want to observe the Universe more […]

If a star spins and then collapses, what happens to its angular momentum? The most common way to form a black hole in the Universe is to have a massive […]