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.

A black hole about 390 million light-years away has caused the biggest eruption ever seen in the universe. The supermassive black hole sits at the center of a galaxy located in the Ophiuchus galaxy cluster. Its eruption was about five times greater than the last record-holder. Black holes suck up matter that comes close to them, but they often expel matter as well. When matter falls toward the black hole, it’s sometimes redirected into beams or jets that blast into space and slam into surrounding material.

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.

In the most extreme regions of the universe, galaxies are being killed. Their star formation is being shut down and astronomers want to know why. The first ever Canadian-led large project on one of the world’s leading telescopes is hoping to do just that. The new program, called the Virgo Environment Traced in Carbon Monoxide survey (VERTICO), is investigating, in brilliant detail, how galaxies are killed by their environment.

Astronomers say this type of cosmic event happens once every 10,000 to 100,000 years.

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

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and new mirror technology confirmed a mystery that could lead to a "new physics," one astrophysicist said.

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.

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

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.

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.

Echoes in gravitational wave signals suggest that the event horizon of a black hole may be more complicated than scientists currently think. Research from the University of Waterloo reports the first tentative detection of these echoes, caused by a microscopic quantum "fuzz" that surrounds newly formed black holes.

Astronauts on board the International Space Station have fixed a $2 billion instrument that peers deep into the universe in the hope of unravelling its secrets. The $2 billion cosmic ray detector, known as Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, had a leak fixed and is expected to get back to looking for antimatter and dark matter in the next few days.

A physicist slams hype about multiverses, string theory, and quantum computers and calls for more diversity in his field

The way the fabric of space and time swirls in a cosmic whirlpool around a dead star has confirmed yet another prediction from Einstein's theory of general relativity, a new study finds. That prediction is a phenomenon known as frame dragging, or the Lense-Thirring effect. It states that space-time will churn around a massive, rotating body. For example, imagine Earth were submerged in honey. As the planet rotated, the honey around it would swirl — and the same holds true with space-time.

Scientists have discovered the first fast radio burst that beats at a steady rhythm, and the mysterious repeating signal is coming from the outskirts of another galaxy.

If you stargaze on a clear winter night, it’s hard to miss the constellation Orion the Hunter, with his shield in one arm and the other arm stretched high to the heavens. A bright red dot called Betelgeuse marks Orion’s shoulder, and this star's strange dimming has captivated skygazers for thousands of years. Aboriginal Australians may have even worked it into their oral histories.

As researchers learn more about dark matter's complexities, it seems possible that our galaxy lives on top of a shadow galaxy without us even knowing it.