Cosmologists are finally beginning to sketch a coherent picture of the universe we cannot see, using exquisitely detailed maps of galaxies, ghostly light and the large scale structure of space itself.

How confusing inevitability with reality built decades of paradox. What if general relativity never actually tells us that ...

New observations suggest that the relationship between light emitted by quasars has changed over cosmic time, hinting that ...

Every galaxy has a supermassive black hole at its center, much like every egg has a yolk. But sometimes, hens lay eggs with two yolks. In a similar way, astrophysicists like us who study supermassive ...

Black hole light echoes are an extreme form of gravitational lensing. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. To measure the masses and ...

Two clashing ideas about disorder inside black holes now point to the same strange conclusions, and it could reshape the ...

Photons are indeed massless, but they still travel through our universe. You can picture the fabric of the cosmos as a sort of grid — one that is four-dimensional and incorporates not only the three ...

A mysterious ring of light is thought to surround every black hole, and Alex Lupsasca wants to glimpse one for the first time. The tendril-thin halo, called a photon ring, has the power to reveal ...

A theoretical phenomenon proposed by famed physicist Stephen Hawking may have changed the shape of the universe, new research proposes. However, a recent study published in the Journal of Cosmology ...

On what might have been the proudest day of Jack Burns’s long career in astronomy, he was sitting on a beach. Orbital dynamics and launch schedules wait for no one, and Burns couldn’t move his ...

"The Milky Way would be a little dot in these two giant eruptions." When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. Astronomers have spotted the ...

Black holes, born from dying stars, are cosmic giants that grow by consuming matter and merging with others. While invisible ...