In this excerpt from "Facing Infinity," Jonas Enander examines how John Michell conceived of "dark stars," or massive bodies with enough gravity to trap light, all the way back in 1783.

"We're stuck at type zero. But what would it take to move between universes? What would it take to enter a black hole? What would it take to break the light barrier?"

10 years ago, LIGO saw its first gravitational wave. After 218 detections, our view of black holes has changed forever. Can this era endure?

“I like to say that physics is hard because physics is easy, by which I mean we actually think about physics as students.”

At the center of Hubble's famous "cosmic horseshoe," a very heavy supermassive black hole has been robustly measured. How is it possible?

Amplifying the energy within a laser, over and over, won't get you an infinite amount of energy. There's a fundamental limit due to physics.

Two supermassive black holes on an inevitable death spiral push the limits of Einstein's relativity. New observations reveal even more.

When the Hubble Space Telescope first launched in 1990, there was so much we didn't know. Here's how far we've come.

Once you cross a black hole's event horizon, there's no going back. But inside, could creating a singularity give birth to a new Universe?

With over 300 high-significance gravitational wave detections, we now have a huge unsolved puzzle. Will we invest in finding the solution?

Will we build a successor collider to the LHC? Someday, we'll reach the true limit of what experiments can probe. But that won't be the end.

“Could black holes be the key to a quantum theory of gravity, a deeper theory of how reality, of how space and time works?”

Massive galaxy cluster Abell S1063, 4.5 billion light-years away, bends and distorts the space nearby. Here's what a JWST deep field shows.

The tiniest galaxies of all are the most severely dominated by dark matter. Could black holes be the cause of the extra gravity instead?

If all massive objects emit Hawking radiation, not just black holes alone, then everything is unstable, even the Universe. Can that be true?

There's an old saying that "what you see is what you get." When it comes to the Universe, however, there's often more to the full story.

"We are all in orbit around the center of the Milky Way galaxy. How big is this collection of stars? Somewhere between 200 and 400 billion suns in the Milky Way galaxy, about 100,000 light years across."

NASA astrophysics, which gave us Hubble, JWST, and so much more, faces its greatest budget cut in history. All future missions are at risk.

There are limits to where physics makes meaningful predictions: beyond the Planck length, time, or energy. Here's why we can't go further.

According to Stephen Hawking, spontaneously emitted radiation should cause all black holes to decay. But we've never seen it: not even once.

"Asking the question of, "Where did the entire universe come from?" is no longer a question for poets and theologians and philosophers. This is a question for scientists, and we have some amazing scientific answers to this question."

In around 7 billion years, we expect the Sun to run out of fuel, dying in a planetary nebula/white dwarf combination. Is that for certain?

Our scientific instruments are constantly improving, revealing nature's workings as never before. Without them, we'll remain in the dark.

Just 165,000 light-years away, the Large Magellanic Cloud is suspected to house a supermassive black hole. At last, evidence has arrived.

The ultimate multi-messenger astronomy event would have gravitational waves, particles, and light arriving all at once. Did that just occur?

Since mid-2022, JWST has been showing us how the Universe grows up, from planets to galaxies and more. So, what's its biggest find of all?

The discovery of ultra-bright, ultra-distant galaxies was JWST's first big surprise. They didn't "break the Universe," and now we know why.

Seven years ago, an outburst in a distant galaxy brightened and faded away. Afterward, a new supermassive black hole jet emerged, but how?

Here in our Universe, stars shine brightly, providing light and heat to planets, moons, and more. But some objects get even hotter, by far.

Many of us look at black holes as cosmic vacuum cleaners: sucking in everything in their vicinity. But it turns out they don't suck at all.