An artist’s impression of the star S2 precessing around the black hole at the center of the Milky Way. Einstein’s theory of general relativity has been proven right (again!), thanks to the wobbly dance of a high-speed star swirling around…
An illustration of the asteroid collision that may have resulted in the formation of Fomalhaut b — an alleged exoplanet that may just be a big cloud of dust. In 2014, a planet disappeared from the night sky. The distant…
Scientists suspect that the complex life that slithers and crawls through every nook and cranny on Earth emerged from a random shuffling of non-living matter that ultimately spit out the building blocks of life. Even so, the details to support…
An artist’s interpretation of the Big Bang. In the beginning, there was an infinitely dense, tiny ball of matter. Then, it all went bang, giving rise to the atoms, molecules, stars and galaxies we see today. Or at least, that’s…
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket making its fourth trip to space launches 60 new Starlink internet satellites into orbit from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on Nov. 11, 2019. SpaceX will launch 60 new Starlink internet satellites into…
Station on April 9, 2020. A Russian official who attended the launch has recently tested positive for the novel coronavirus.” class=” block-image-ads hero-image” onerror=”if(this.src && this.src.indexOf(‘missing-image.svg’) !== -1){return true;};this.parentNode.replaceChild(window.missingImage(),this)” srcset=” 320w, 480w, 650w, 970w, 1024w” sizes=”(min-width:…
An artist’s depiction of a magnetar. Magnetars — highly magnetized, rapidly rotating super-dense stars — are among the most enigmatic creatures to inhabit the cosmos and their origins are shrouded in mystery. Do they come from supernova explosions of dying…
Light escaping from a black hole may “boomerang” its way to freedom, new X-ray images reveal. Researchers found this odd behavior while reviewing archival X-ray observations of a black hole that’s approximately 10 times as massive as our sun. Located…
Two young nebulas burst to life in the galaxy next-door. Young stars blaze to life in a nearby galaxy, repainting their cosmic neighborhood with fiery blooms of gas and radiation. This new Hubble Space Telescope image captures just another day…
A photograph showing SpaceX’s first batch of Starlink satellites during launch on May 23, 2019. SpaceX’s Starlink internet satellites will soon sport an accessory to tamp down their surprising brightness. That brightness worries many astronomers, who say that the huge…
A map of the sky shows the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), a remnant of the period of the early universe when this lost dark matter might have existed. One of the deepest mysteries in physics, known as the Hubble tension,…
When the bizarre world of quantum physics — where a “cat” can be both alive and dead, and particles a galaxy apart are connected — is merged with computer technology, the result is unprecedented power to anyone who masters this…