Supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies can get absurdly huge, sometimes reaching masses billions of times greater than our Sun. The rate at which black holes grow can vary, but Australian astronomers have detected one such object with an unusually intense appetite, making it the fastest-growing black hole…
Stephen Hawking may have passed away in March, but his final work has now been published in a scientific journal.
You might think you have gravity pretty well figured out. If you drop a ball out of a window, a short time later it will hit the ground. The higher up you drop it, the faster it travels before it hits the ground.
There are few easier ways to get people to read your website than to scare them. That’s how we ended up with the media frenzy surrounding Tiangong-1, and it’s why InfoWars continues to exist. It’s also how we’ve ended up with folks telling you the universe is due to end. Heck, we’re guilty ourselves.
When you look up into the night sky, you see lots of stars—but all of them are members of our own Milky Way galaxy. With the help of some spacetime-warping science, though, our eyes can now peer much deeper into distant space.
From what scientists have gathered, galaxies are nearly synonymous with dark matter. They seem to be mostly dark matter with specks of regular matter mixed in. Despite the fact that no dark matter has been directly observed with science experiments, galaxies’ strange motion is the knock-out reason why astronomers…
This past June, 500 pounds of a specially fabricated crystal buried in an Italian mountain seemed to glow just a little brighter. It wasn’t the first time, nor the last—every year, the signal seems to increase and decrease like clockwork as the Earth orbits the Sun.
Less than two weeks before his death on March 14, beloved cosmologist Stephen Hawking put the final touches on a research paper about the origin and nature of the Universe. Some media outlets have been pouring praise onto the paper, saying it could be the most important thing he ever did. On closer inspection,…
It would be silly to think that scientists and astronomers have spotted all of the different kinds of weird things that exist in space. After all, we’re pretty sure the universe is mostly composed of dark matter and dark energy that we haven’t directly detected. But new research seems to imply that there are entirely…
Today, scientists announced that they’d seen evidence of a long-sought signal from the first stars. This slight change to some ambient radio waves could herald the first step in a new kind of astronomy. But maybe, just maybe, it’s also evidence of dark matter interacting with regular matter in the ancient universe.
When you sweep across the FM radio band, you don’t always hear music—mostly, you hear static. Lots of this ambient noise is actually garbled signals from throughout the Milky Way. If you had perhaps the most sensitive FM receiver on Earth, you might pick up the tiniest dip in volume: a signal that comes not from our…
There’s a black hole called Sagittarius A* at the center of our galaxy. It has 4 million times the mass of the sun, but is only around the size of Mercury’s orbit. It’s 26,000 light years away, but let’s say some unfortunate mishap brought you within a light year or two of that behemoth. What would happen?
Galaxies have supermassive black holes at their centers—our Milky Way, for example, has its own 4-million-solar-mass one, Sagittarius A*. Some astronomers have previously thought that there’s a simple relationship between the galaxy’s size, the black hole’s mass, and how much light the black hole spits out while it…
Supernovae are already some of the brightest explosions in the universe—but there’s more mysterious type, called superluminous supernovae, that can shine a hundred times brighter than the usual ones. And on August 22, 2016, astronomers spotted one whose light traveled over 10 billion years to reach us.
The closest galaxy to our own is the majestic Andromeda galaxy, a collection of a trillion stars located a “mere” 2 million light years away. New research suggests that, contrary to previous estimates, this galaxy isn’t much bigger than the Milky Way, and is practically our twin. This means our galaxy won’t be…
We’re probably not living in a computer simulation, despite some people’s insistence to the contrary. But that doesn’t mean we can’t create our own awe-inspiring simulations of the universe.
Scientists thought the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies were unique: They’ve got rings of smaller dwarf galaxies orbiting in what seems to be a synchronized fashion. But when a team of scientists recently looked at another galaxy, they realized it also seemed to shepherd a flock of dwarfs in a strange, synchronized…
Based on physicists’ measurements, most of the mass in the universe is actually taken up by dark matter. Whatever this stuff is, we can see its effects on the behavior of distant galaxies, though no experiment has detected it here on Earth. Doing so probably requires knowing how fast it moves.
First detected in 2002, Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) are quick, high-energy pulses originating from galaxies billions of light years away. Scientists still don’t know the true nature of these bursts or what’s causing them, but new observations of the only known repeating FRBs are providing details about the extreme…
It can be easy to take hyped-up science papers as fact, especially when they involve the most esoteric imaginable ideas. But scientists are taking issue with a hyped-up new paper that claims it can eliminate the need for dark matter or dark energy in our Universe.
