astrophysics

On May 12, at nine simultaneous press conferences around the world, astrophysicists revealed the first image of the black hole at the heart of the Milky Way. At first, awesome though it was,…

The one thing that all human civilizations have in common is that they end. For 10,000 years or so, that's been the common factor. You can make an argument that civilizations tend not to…

Gamma rays from this supernova remnant have been seen by telescopes since 2007, but exceptionally energetic light wasn’t detected until 2020, when it was picked up by the HAWC Observatory in…

In particular, Antypas’ team uses their experiment to search for a class of dark matter known as ultralight dark matter. At its heaviest, an ultralight dark matter particle is still about a…

A group of scientists may have stumbled upon a radical new way to do cosmology.Cosmologists usually determine the composition of the universe by observing as much of it as possible. But…

After just seven months, a huge team of scientists who work with the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument have already mapped a larger swath of the cosmos than all other 3D surveys combined.…

Next year, we will begin creating our most detailed map yet of the visible sky, as the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile begins operations. The information it collects will far surpass…

The first detection of gravitational waves in 2016 provided decisive confirmation of Einstein’s general theory of relativity. But another astounding prediction remains unconfirmed: According…

Jeletic and his team also try to anticipate potential mishaps. For example, they found that the thin wires Hubble’s gyroscopes depend on gradually corrode and break, and three of its six…

The objects Dee and his colleagues studied, recovered from L’Anse aux Meadows decades ago and carefully preserved in a freezer in a Parks Canada storage facility in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia,…