This App Points You Straight at the Milky Way’s Supermassive Black Hole
If you want to stay grounded—which is to say, you want a haunting reminder of your own diminutive size and mortality—do I have the tool for you. Meet Galactic Compass:…
Physicists Measure Gravity of Smallest Mass Yet
Despite keeping us grounded and warping light that travels through space, gravity is actually quite a weak force. The smaller the mass, the less gravity appears to have any pull,…
Nesting Doll Stars Proposed as Solution to General Relativity
If you asked an astrophysicist what is yet to be discovered in the universe, there’s a good chance they’d paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld: It’s full of known unknowns. What Drew Noomi…
Fastest-Growing Black Hole Is Eating a Sun Per Day
Our Sun is about 330,000 times the mass of Earth, yet it is dwarfed by the black holes that lurk at the centers of galaxies. A team of astronomers recently…
9 Things You Didn’t Know About Black Holes
An artist’s impression of GRB 221009A, which may have heralded the birth of a black hole.Image: NASA/Swift/Cruz deWilde Black holes. Despite their names, the enigmatic objects are opposite of vacuous.…
Hell Yeah, We’re Getting a Space-Based Gravitational Wave Observatory
Stay calm, everybody stay calm. But it’s finally happening: The European Space Agency is committing itself to the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA), a gravitational wave observatory that will study…
Mystery Object in Deep Space Is Confounding Astronomers
A team of scientists found a compact object 40,000 light-years from Earth that is either a very massive neutron star or an itsy-bitsy black hole, but they’re not sure which.…
Behold: The Oldest Black Hole Ever Found
A team of researchers found a black hole from the early universe, prompting new questions as to how such ancient massive objects might form. The black hole dates to about…
Record-breaking supermassive black hole is oldest even seen in X-rays
Astronomers recently discovered the most distant black hole ever observed in the X-ray wavelength, and it has some unusual properties that could help uncover the mysteries of how the largest…
Swift Observatory spots a black hole snacking on a nearby star
Black holes can be hungry beasts, devouring anything that comes to close to them, including clouds of gas, rogue planets, and even stars. When stars get too close to a…