Why we need to save the Chandra space telescope
Chandra X-ray ObservatoryNASA/CXC & J. Vaughan On 23 July 1999, just months before I started university, NASA’s space shuttle Columbia launched with precious cargo on board. Not only was it…
Chandra X-ray ObservatoryNASA/CXC & J. Vaughan On 23 July 1999, just months before I started university, NASA’s space shuttle Columbia launched with precious cargo on board. Not only was it…
Illustration of a tidal disruption eventMark Garlick/Science Photo Library/Getty Images Astronomers have caught a supermassive black hole eating a giant star in the biggest and brightest example of this powerful…
An artist’s depiction of a black hole with gamma ray bursts shooting out into spaceMarc Ward/Shutterstock A new explanation for how black holes get their extreme magnetic fields could also…
How do enormous black holes merge?Jurik Peter/Shutterstock Supermassive black holes sometimes merge, but for decades, astrophysicists have not known how. Now, we may finally have a solution in the form…
In a recent column, I wrote about black holes. A curious reader sent in a letter asking some interesting follow-up questions about topics that I didn’t really have time to…
We are living in the era of black hole photography. In 2019, the first picture taken of a black hole was released. Unsurprisingly, it was difficult to get – in…
Dead Planets Society is a podcast that takes outlandish ideas about how to tinker with the cosmos – from snapping the moon in half to causing a gravitational wave apocalypse…
This red blob is a distant galaxy with strange propertiesNASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI The “little red dots” discovered by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) pose a cosmic conundrum.…
Light cannot condense enough to create a black holeVadim Sadovski/Shutterstock It seems it is not possible to form black holes out of light alone. If energy and mass are one…
Adobe Stock/Erika Eros/Alamy/Collage: Ryan Wills Deep inside a black hole, the cosmos gets twisted beyond comprehension. Here, at some infinitesimal point of infinite density, the fabric of the universe gets…