The fastest-growing black hole ever seen is swallowing the mass equivalent of an entire Earth every second. This gargantuan black hole has a mass 3 billion times that of the sun, and its rapid consumption is causing the behemoth to grow rapidly, an international research team found. The black hole gorges via a process called accretion, in which it siphons matter from a thin disk of gas and dust rotating around the massive object.

In the over three decades that Bob Popp has been traipsing through the Vermont woods as the state’s botanist, he had never encountered a small whorled pogonia within the state. He had seen the yellowish-green orchid on excursions to other states, but never in Vermont, where the flower had been considered locally extinct since 1902. Despite its vast range within the U.S. from Missouri and Michigan up through Maine, the species has been considered threatened by federal wildlife officials since 1982.

Researchers have discovered a new particle that is a magnetic relative of the Higgs boson. Whereas the discovery of the Higgs boson required the tremendous particle-accelerating power of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), this never-before-seen particle  —  dubbed the axial Higgs boson — was found using an experiment that would fit on a small kitchen countertop.

Cave explorers in the Guangxi region of China have found a secret ancient forest hidden inside a 630-foot-deep sinkhole. As seen in a Twitter video posted by the China state-affiliated media organization CGTN earlier this month, the karst sinkhole — formed by rainwater that dissolves bedrock — exceeds 5 million cubic meters in area.

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) has spotted something incredible in the Milky Way galaxy — something its team is calling "groundbreaking." But what exactly that discovery is, we won't find out until Thursday (May 12).

Astronomers have revealed the trails of nearly 1,500 new asteroids hidden in data gathered by NASA's most venerable space telescope. In a new study, astronomers and a team of amateur scientists have worked together to comb through archival data from the Hubble Space Telescope. The project began on International Asteroid Day in 2019, when a team of astronomers launched the "Hubble Asteroid Hunter" project on Zooniverse, a popular platform for crowdsourcing science. The project's aim was to identify asteroids in old data from Hubble; signals that, in other studies, might have just been filtered out as noise.

Scientists have discovered evidence that a key rare resource, called helium-3, is potentially ten times more common on Earth than previously known—though the source of all this extra supply remains mysterious, reports a new study. The finding is important because helium-3 could serve as a foundation of limitless clean power for our civilization, but has been seen as inaccessible since it is largely found in outer space locations, especially the Moon.

Have you ever stared at the long ice sheets in the Antarctic and wondered what lies beneath? Now, Columbia University researchers have explored this question and found an answer that may surprise you, according to a study published in Science on Thursday.

Archaeologists have analyzed the residue inside four medieval ceramic shards and determined that one of them may have been used as a hand grenade, according to a recent paper published in the journal PLOS One. And the explosive used was likely made locally rather than gunpowder imported from China.

Long-extinct "fish lizards" first appeared in the ocean about 250 million years ago, and their fossils were found high in the Swiss Alps. According to a study published Thursday in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, the fossil discovery of the marine reptile carnivores, known as ichthyosaurs, make them some the largest creatures to ever live on Earth – even bigger than sperm whales and on par with dinosaurs – given that they weighed about 80 tons and spanned 65 feet.

There’s something amiss with a mass. A new measurement of the mass of an elementary particle, the W boson, has defied expectations. The result hints at a possible flaw in physicists’ otherwise stalwart theory of the fundamental bits and bobs of our world, known as the standard model.

Scientists have discovered an “unusual” new species of deep-sea jellyfish living in the waters off the California coast. The creature, a type of Atolla jellyfish, was discovered by scientists at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI). It lives in the so-called midnight zone of the ocean – between one and four kilometers deep – a mysterious region where light only comes from animals that produce it themselves and the pressure reaches 5,580 pounds a square inch.

A team of astronomers, with the help of the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (ESO's VLT), have observed a new type of stellar explosion—a micronova. These outbursts happen on the surface of certain stars, and can each burn through around 3.5 billion Great Pyramids of Giza of stellar material in only a few hours.

Astronomers have discovered a third planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, the star closest to the Sun. Called Proxima Centauri d, the newly spotted world is probably smaller than Earth, and could have oceans of liquid water. “It’s showing that the nearest star probably has a very rich planetary system,” says Guillem Anglada-Escudé, an astronomer at the Institute of Space Sciences in Barcelona, Spain, who led the team that, in 2016, discovered the first planet to be seen orbiting Proxima Centauri.

The nearest black hole to Earth isn’t a black hole at all. Instead, what scientists thought was a stellar triplet — two stars and a black hole — is actually a pair of stars caught in a unique stage of evolution.

A gigantic prehistoric “sea dragon” discovered in the Midlands has been described as one of the greatest finds in the history of British palaeontology. The ichthyosaur, which is about 180m years old with a skeleton measuring about 10 metres in length and a skull weighing about a tonne, is the largest and most complete fossil of its kind ever found in the UK. Joe Davis of the Leicestershire and Rutland Wildlife Trust discovered it during the routine draining of a lagoon island at the Rutland Water reservoir in February 2021.

You don't need to be an expert in science to understand that black holes often pull things in rather than spit them out. However, NASA has just discovered something quite weird around the supermassive black hole Markarian 335.

It's the dreaded C-word: Cancer. Some dare not even say it in case it happens to them. Despite many advances in science, we are still at a loss for an effective cure for cancer. Now, a research team led by scientists at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center may have made a significant breakthrough in treating pancreatic cancer, according to a press release published by the institute on Wednesday.

A pair of translucent glass spheres, each measuring over a half-inch thick, have been spotted in an impact crater near the lunar south pole. They’re the first of their kind to ever be discovered on the Moon. New research in Science Bulletin describes the “the first discovery of macroscopic and translucent glass globules on the Moon.” The beads likely formed from the heat generated by a violent impact or possibly from early volcanic activity.

When galaxies merge, the clouds of gas and dust that are part of galaxies collide with each other, sometimes resulting in the formation of new stars.