After three years of upgrading and waiting, due in part to the coronavirus pandemic, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory has officially resumed its hunt for the signatures of crashing black… Read More
Christine Ye, a senior at Eastlake High School in Sammamish, Wash., has won the top award in the nation’s oldest and most prestigious competitions for science students, thanks to her… Read More
Telltale ripples in the fabric of spacetime have revealed the existence of a cosmic object that scientists can’t definitively classify. Whatever it is, the object was engulfed suddenly by a… Read More
What will people remember about the year 2019 in the year 3019? Just as they’re likely to recall 1969 as the year humans first walked on the moon, they might… Read More
Two detections of gravitational waves, separated by a mere 21 minutes, set off a flurry of excitement among astronomers today. Was it a binary black-hole merger? A double observation of… Read More
The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO, has detected mergers of black holes, and even a couple of neutron star smash-ups. But it hasn’t yet confirmed the signature of a… Read More
–One of the biggest scientific feats was accomplished this year when a team of astronomers captured an image of a black hole. The achievement reignited our wonder and enthusiasm toward… Read More
The science teams for the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO, and Europe’s Virgo detector today laid out the details of their recent detections, including a crash between neutron stars,… Read More
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Scientists today shared the first picture to show the immediate surroundings of a galaxy’s supermassive black hole, captured by a network of radio telescopes that adds up… Read More
Physicists won’t be fooling around on April 1 at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory in Washington state and Louisiana, or at the Virgo gravitational-wave detector in Italy. Instead, they’ll all… Read More
Four more mergers of black holes, including the biggest one recorded to date, have been added to a catalog generated by gravitational-wave detectors. The additions were announced today by the… Read More
News Brief: A 26-year-long observational campaign provides clear evidence of the effect that general relativity has on the motion of a star known as S2 as it boomerangs around the… Read More
An array of detectors buried under a half-mile-wide stretch of Antarctic ice has traced the path of a single neutrino back to a supermassive black hole in a faraway galaxy,… Read More
After decades’ worth of mystery, it feels as if physicists are finally closing in on the nature of black holes, thanks to Nobel-winning breakthroughs like the first detections of black… Read More
News Brief: A month after the breakup of China’s Tiangong-1 space lab, another spacecraft went to its fiery doom today with far less fanfare. Orbital assessments from the U.S. military’s… Read More
Black holes are the collapsed stars of the show on “Black Hole Apocalypse,” a two-hour “NOVA” presentation that’s premiering Wednesday on PBS. But the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, also known… Read More
It turns out that even galaxies can be photobombed. Imagery from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and ground-based telescopes reveal what researchers say could be the closest-orbiting pair of supermassive black… Read More
It took months to figure it out, but the scientists in charge of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory, or LIGO, have confirmed their observations of the most lightweight black hole… Read More
Astronomers have detected their fourth gravitational wave from the merger of two black holes, but this one marks a new milestone. It’s the first wave picked up by the Virgo… Read More
The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory has detected its third confirmed black hole merger, and this one’s a doozy: LIGO’s latest discovery is about 3 billion light-years away, which is more than… Read More
NASA is committing $188 million to build and launch a space telescope to observe patterns in the X-ray radiation emanating from black holes, neutron stars and pulsars. The Imaging X-ray… Read More
It looks as if gravitational-wave watchers are in for a bumpy, beautiful ride. Scientists using the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO, have confirmed the detection of another merger involving… Read More
Black holes may have gotten a bad rap. And wormholes just might be a realistic way to travel Star Trek-style after all. Years ago, the traditional wisdom about those exotic… Read More
Interstellar‘s bad boy (and central plot device) has got nothing on this astronomical discovery. A mammoth black hole — and that’s “mammoth” in terms of tonnage — has been found… Read More
We’d all like to know more about the universe, and on Jan. 13, Dr. Katie Mack, a postdoctoral researcher of dark matter, was interviewed at Ada’s Technical Books and Café on… Read More