Pair of Merging Quasars Reveals Secrets of the Universe’s Earliest Days
A team of astronomers has spotted the most distant merging galactic cores yet, seen as they were when the universe was less than a billion years old. The duo of…
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…
Aliens Could Be Trying to Get Our Attention Via Supernova-Timed Beacons
A recent SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) effort focused on a famous supernova from 1987, working under the premise that aliens might use such events to draw attention to themselves…
Astrophysicists Clock Highest-Radiation Blasts Ever Recorded From a Pulsar
Pulsars are one of the strangest celestial bodies in space. These cosmic lighthouses emit periodic bursts of radiation from their magnetic poles, and now a team of researchers claim they…
Arecibo Observatory Prepares for Life After Astronomy
In December 2020, the Arecibo Observatory’s radio telescope was destroyed when a catastrophic cable failure caused its 900-ton platform to collapse onto the iconic dish below. Now, the National Science…
NASA’s Main Hotline to Space Is in Jeopardy Due to Increasing Demand
In order to contact its interplanetary spacecraft, NASA relies on an array of giant radio antennas spread across different parts of the world. The trusty communications network has been transferring…
Perplexing Pulsar ‘Switching’ Behavior Finally Deciphered by Astronomers
A rapidly spinning dead star’s wacky fluctuations in brightness are due to the extreme environment surrounding the object, according to a team of astronomers who observed it. Watch a Clip…
A Mysterious Object in Deep Space Has Blinked Every 22 Minutes for Over 30 Years
An intensely magnetic neutron star roughly 15,000 light-years from Earth is stumping astronomers with its ultra long periods, unleashing radio waves into the cosmos every 22 minutes. Inspiration Behind Immortal…
Breakthrough Gravitational Wave Findings Suggest Supermassive Black Holes Are Constantly Warping Spacetime
Astronomers and astrophysicists at five different pulsar timing array collaborations today announced data that strongly suggests the presence of a gravitational wave background: a constant murmur of low-frequency ripples in…
Massive Black Holes Littered the Early Universe, Simulation Suggests
Since the gravitational waves predicted by Einstein were first detected in 2015, astrophysicists have been pondering the gravitational wave background—the cumulative undulations of these spacetime ripples as they cross the…