An unprecedented signal from unevenly sized objects gives astronomers rare insight into how black holes spin

The first sign that Albert Einstein’s theory of gravity was correct has made a repeat appearance, this time near a supermassive black hole. In 1915, Einstein realized that his newly formulated general theory of relativity explained a weird quirk in the orbit of Mercury. Now, that same effect has been found in a star’s orbit of the enormous black hole at the heart of the Milky Way, researchers with the GRAVITY collaboration report April 16 in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

A close encounter with another star may have ripped the cigar-shaped interstellar visitor ‘Oumuamua from its parent body, flinging it toward our solar system.

At about 50,000 times the mass of the Sun, this intermediate-mass black hole skirts the line between shrimp and giant.

A star that pulsates on just one side has been discovered in the Milky Way about 1500 light years from Earth. It is the first of its kind to be found and scientists expect to find many more similar systems as technology to listen inside the beating hearts of stars improves.

When a massive star dies in a supernova, the explosion is only the beginning of the end. Most of the stellar matter is thrown far and wide, but the star’s iron-filled heart remains behind. This core packs as much mass as two Suns and quickly shrinks to a sphere that would span the length of Manhattan. Crushing internal pressure — enough to squeeze Mount Everest to the size of a sugar cube — fuses subatomic protons and electrons into neutrons.

This isn't how black holes are supposed to behave.

This isn't how black holes are supposed to behave.

A discovery that made headlines in November is shot down in December, thanks to a sharp-eyed young astronomer

Astronomers using a new technique to hunt black holes found one 70 times as heavy as the Sun

An international team of scientists has created the most detailed large-scale model of the universe to date, a simulation they call TNG50.

An entirely new class of black holes may be lurking in the universe, and these may be far tinier than what scientists have found before, according to new findings.

Black holes are an important part of how astrophysicists make sense of the universe – so important that scientists have been trying to build a census of all the black holes in the Milky Way galaxy. But new research shows that their search might have been missing an entire class of black holes that they didn’t know existed.

Astronomers say this type of cosmic event happens once every 10,000 to 100,000 years. Events like this are not only incredibly rare but difficult to capture. NASA managed it with a state-of-the-art satellite and a network of robotic telescopes.

As the Big Bang theory goes, somewhere around 13.8 billion years ago the universe exploded into being, as an infinitely small, compact fireball of matter that cooled as it expanded, triggering reactions that cooked up the first stars and galaxies, and all the forms of matter that we see (and are) today.

Some of the strongest magnetic fields ever detected in the Universe come from magnetars. Now, we might finally know how these strange objects form.

The discovery of strontium created inside a neutron star smashup gives the clearest picture yet of what goes on inside this chaotic environment.

New simulations suggest that when two stars collide, the resulting product can be extremely magnetic, and it may ultimately wind up as a magnetar.

Primordial black holes born in the moments after the big bang could clear up some of cosmology's most confounding conundrums

Images from computer simulations highlight how the extreme gravity of a black hole tampers with light rays emanating from its accretion disk to create weird patterns.