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Black Hole
They’re one of the brightest windows into our Universe’s star-forming past. When we look out at the galaxies in the Universe, almost all of them have supermassive black holes at […]
It comes from a supernova seen just 33 years ago, and it doesn’t pulse. 33 years ago, a supernova occurred just 168,000 light-years from Earth. This new image of the supernova […]
5 years ago, LIGO detected our first gravitational waves here on Earth. Next decade, LISA will start seeing them from space. When it comes to gravitational waves, our terrestrial laser interferometers […]
The biggest error from ‘A Brief History of Time’ continues to misinform generations of aspiring physicists. The greatest idea of Stephen Hawking’s scientific career truly revolutionized how we think about […]
The theoretical reasons to expect it are compelling, but the technology required to detect it is unfathomable. All throughout our galaxy, millions of black holes of a variety of masses […]
In 2011, a bizarre, green object was discovered. At long last, we finally understand why. One of astronomy’s biggest surprises came in 2007, when a mysterious green object was found. […]
They said the “missing half” of the Universe’s matter was just found. But what they found barely makes a dent to the big picture. When we look up into the great […]
Think they all burn through their fuel, die, and leave white dwarfs, neutron stars, or black holes behind? Think again. The day will come when our Sun, like most stars, can […]
If you traveled in a straight line for far enough, would you come back to where you started? If you were to set out on a journey from anywhere on Earth’s […]
We just found the first one within 1,000 light-years of us. But there’s probably one much, much closer. For a long time, black holes were known to exist only in the […]
Is that required for detectors like LIGO and Virgo to work? Whenever any two things in the Universe interact at the same location in spacetime, one thing always remains true about […]
There’s a million things we haven’t done. But just you wait. The Universe as we know it began some 13.8 billion years ago with the onset of the hot Big Bang. […]
A generation ago, NASA launched their great observatories to explore the Universe. It’s time for round 2. Throughout the history of astronomy, every advance we’ve ever made has come about because […]
When you look at the Universe in an entirely new way, you sometimes find what you could never have anticipated. Almost exactly one year ago today, the Event Horizon Telescope […]
Hawking radiation should really be happening, but black holes are farther from decaying than ever before. Black holes are, in many ways, the most extreme objects that will ever exist in […]
A year ago, a puzzling gap existed between black holes and neutron stars. With nearly a year of new data, LIGO solves the puzzle. On Monday, March 16, 2020, astrophysicist Carl […]
After the Big Bang, merging supermassive black holes are unparalleled. Here’s how we’ll find the first one. Last week, NASA’s Chandra X-ray observatory made history by announcing the most energetic explosive […]
A black hole punched a hole 15 Milky Ways across in a galaxy cluster’s gas, by far the largest ‘kaboom’ ever seen. The Universe, everywhere we look, is full of cataclysmic […]
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 […]