black holes

The NANOGrav team was essentially able to turn the Milky Way into a giant gravitational wave detector by measuring the signals from these pulsars to determine when a wave nudged them. The…

Hotta found, to his surprise, that a simple sequence of events could, in fact, induce the quantum vacuum to go negative—giving up energy it didn’t appear to have. “First I thought I was…

Intriguingly, this kind of decoherence will occur anywhere there is a horizon that only allows information to travel in one direction, creating the potential for causality paradoxes. The…

In the early 2000s, Phil Plait wrote his first book, Bad Astronomy, which debunked conspiracy theories and fallacies, like the idea that NASA faked the moon landings in the 1970s or that…

Nearly 400,000 years after the Big Bang, the primordial plasma of the infant universe cooled enough for the first atoms to coalesce, making space for the embedded radiation to soar free.…

The cosmos seems to have a preference for things that are round. Planets and stars tend to be spheres because gravity pulls clouds of gas and dust toward the center of mass. The same holds…

Cosmologists have spent decades striving to understand why our universe is so stunningly vanilla. Not only is it smooth and flat as far as we can see, but it’s also expanding at an…

On the morning of October 9, astronomers’ inboxes pinged with a relatively modest alert: NASA’s Swift Observatory had just detected a fresh burst of energy, assumed to be coming from…

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,…

FP StaffOct 14, 2022 16:26:35 ISTA startling new discovery was made completely by accident that could possibly change everything that we know about black holes, physics and space.…