Material falling into a black hole casts X-rays out into space—and now astronomers have used the echoes of this radiation to map the dynamic behavior and surroundings of a black hole itself. Most black holes are too small on the sky for us to determine their immediate environment, but we can still explore these mysterious objects by watching how matter behaves as it nears, and falls into, them.

Every season has its characteristic star constellations in the night sky. Orion—one of the most recognizable—is distinctly visible on crisp, clear winter nights in the northern hemisphere. The constellation is easy to spot even in light-polluted cities, with its bright stars representing the shape of a person.

Just as astronomers thought they were making sense of fast radio bursts (FRBs) — the mysterious repeating signals originating deep in space — the universe threw us a curveball.

When searching for dark matter, astronomers must go on a sort of "ghost hunt." That's because dark matter is an invisible substance that cannot be seen directly. Yet it makes up the bulk of the universe's mass and forms the scaffolding upon which galaxies are built. Dark matter is the gravitational "glue" that holds galaxies as well as galaxy clusters together. Astronomers can detect its presence indirectly by measuring how its gravity affects stars and galaxies.

One of the brightest stars in the sky makes up Orion's shoulder and also looks to be on the verge of going supernova sometime between today and 100,000 years from today.

Even a galaxy teeming with star-hopping alien civilizations should still harbor isolated, unvisited worlds—and Earth might be among them

A massive simulation of the universe is digitally recreating the lives of stars, black holes and galaxies. Richard Bower at Durham University in the UK and his colleagues have created a computer simulation approximately 1 billion light years across, which models tens of thousands of galaxies.

No one really knows what happens inside an atom.

A network of eight radio telescopes around the world helped to record the image

Like the planet Tatooine from Star Wars, two suns — one bright, one dim and red— rise over the horizon of Kepler 47d. But unlike dry and sandy Tatooine, this planet’s surface is gassy and indistinct. The system also holds two smaller planets; one planet closer to the double suns, and one farther out. Both lack a solid surface. If you visited in a spaceship, all the planets would be easy to spot because they’re packed, along with their stars, into a space smaller than Earth’s orbit around the Sun.

The Universe is so unimaginably big, and it's positively teeming with an almost infinite supply of potentially life-giving worlds. So where the heck is everybody?

That gold on your ring finger is stellar – and not just in a complimentary way. In a finding that may overthrow our understanding of where Earth’s heavy elements such as gold and platinum come from, new research by a University of Guelph physicist suggests that most of them were spewed from a lar

When, in 2017, the LIGO experiment detected gravitational waves from two neutron stars colliding, it sent electromagnetic and gravitational ripples through the universe and the astronomical community.

Astronomers have measured the spin rate of five, distant supermassive black holes for a study published in the Astrophysical Journal.

Using images obtained from the Hubble Space Telescope, a US collaboration of astronomers have detected two supermassive black holes on a collision course, 2.5 billion light years from Earth. The two black holes will continue to get closer to each other sending out huge ripples in space-time, known as gravitational waves, which can be detected back on Earth. Though we're not likely to detect their signal for billions of years, they will help astronomers gain a better understanding of these enormous ripples.

When NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite launched into space in April 2018, it did so with a specific goal: to search the universe for new planets.

From the inflationary state that preceded the Big Bang to our cold, lonely, dark energy-dominated fate, the Universe goes through six different eras. We're living in the last one already.

The oldest stars in our Galaxy are also the busiest, moving more rapidly than their younger counterparts in and out of the disk of the Milky Way, according to new analysis carried out at the University of Birmingham.

Aphysicist claimed that Earth and the entire universe could already be inside a black hole. According to the physicist, this theory is related to the idea that the Big Bang was actually a black hole. As indicated in various scientific reports, black holes can form through a number of ways such as when a massive star bigger than the Sun collapses on itself and dies. This occurrence causes a supernova and a formation of a black hole. Scientists also believe that a collision between two neutron stars can create a black hole.

An international collaboration that captured the first image of a black hole, a cosmic plughole from which nothing that enters can ever escape, has won the most lucrative prize in physics. Hundreds of researchers on the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) team will share the $3m Breakthrough prize in fundamental physics for their image of the monster black hole at the heart of Messier 87, a galaxy 55m light years from Earth.