You’ve heard it before: In space, no one can hear you scream. That’s because sound doesn’t move through a vacuum, and everyone knows that space is a vacuum. The thing is, that’s not completely true.

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

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.

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.

If Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity holds true, then a black hole, born from the cosmically quaking collisions of two massive black holes, should itself “ring” in the aftermath, producing gravitational waves much like a struck bell reverbates sound waves. Einstein predicted that the particular pitch and decay of these gravitational waves should be a direct signature of the newly formed black hole’s mass and spin.

A rare trio of supermassive black holes has been caught in the act of coming together. Three of the light-gobbling monsters nuzzle shoulder to shoulder in SDSS J084905.51+111447.2, a system of three merging galaxies about 1 billion light-years from Earth, a new study reports.

Astronomers have discovered the oldest cluster of galaxies ever seen, which dates to the early universe. The discovery, which could help explain the shape of the modern cosmos, reveals 12 galaxies that existed in a clump 13 billion years ago — just about 700 million years after the Big Bang. We can see them now because they're so far away in the expanding universe (13 billion light-years) that their starlight is only now reaching Earth. One of the galaxies, a mammoth named Himiko after a mythological Japanese queen, was discovered a decade ago by the same team.

There are a few rules in the Universe that seem likely to never be broken. Particles cannot travel faster than the speed of light in a vacuum; the entropy of a closed system can never decrease; energy and momentum must be conserved. But if the rules that the Universe plays by are different than we understand them today, many things that appear to be forbidden today may be possible after all.

One of the Hubble Space Telescope's most famous images peered even deeper into the cosmos than scientists had thought. That photo is the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field (HUDF), which combines hundreds of images taken by the space telescope over multiple years into the deepest view of the universe ever created. The composite pic of a small patch of sky contains a whopping 10,000 galaxies, astronomers have estimated. (The HUDF also refers to that patch of sky, not just imagery of it.)

Our Milky Way galaxy will survive in its current form a bit longer than some astronomers had thought, a new study suggests. The monster collision between our Milky Way and fellow spiral galaxy Andromeda will occur about 4.5 billion years from now, according to the new research, which is based on observations made by Europe’s Gaia spacecraft. Some prominent previous estimates had predicted the crash would happen significantly sooner, in about 3.9 billion years.

A San Diego State University astrophysicist has helped discover evidence of a gigantic remnant surrounding an exploding star—a shell of material so huge, it must have been erupting on a regular basis for millions of years. When a white dwarf, the core of a dead star, is in a close orbit with another star, it pulls gas from the other star. The gas becomes heated and compressed, eventually exploding to create a nova. This explosion causes the star to brighten by a millionfold and eject material at thousands of miles per second.

What keeps George Hotz, the enigmatic hacker and founder of self-driving startup Comma.ai, up at night is not whether his autonomous car company will be successful or what other entrepreneurial venture he might embark on next. No, instead, Hotz says he’s tortured by the possibility that all of us are in an advanced simulation observed by either an omnipotent extraterrestrial or supernatural being, or an artificial intelligence far beyond the realm of human conception and understanding.

A team of international astronomers have been hunting for ancient, supermassive black holes -- and they've hit the motherlode, discovering 83 previously unknown quasars. The universe is full of supermassive black holes, monstrous versions of the humble, everyday black hole, containing masses millions or billions of times that of our sun. These huge cosmic beasts generate mammoth gravitational effects, so you often find supermassive black holes hiding out at the center of galaxies, orbited by billions of stars. That's exactly what happens in our home galaxy of the Milky Way.

The center of our galaxy is a frenzy of activity. A behemoth black hole—4 million times as massive as the sun—blasts out energy as it chows down on interstellar detritus while neighboring stars burst to life and subsequently explode. Now, an international team of astronomers has discovered two exhaust channels—dubbed "galactic center chimneys"—that appear to funnel matter and energy away from the cosmic fireworks in the Milky Way's center, about 28,000 light-years from Earth.

Astronomers discovered a pulsar, a kind of zombie star, racing across the galaxy so quickly that it could get from Earth to the Moon in six minutes flat. The dead star has a tail pointing back toward the remnant of a supernova that exploded 10,000 years ago. Astronomers suspected this might have provided the kick that sent the pulsar speeding off, but had to wait for 10 years of telescope data to make their case convincing.

Paul M. Sutter is an astrophysicist at The Ohio State University, host of Ask a Spaceman and Space Radio, and author of Your Place in the Universe. Sutter contributed this article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. So there's this stuff called "antimatter." You may have heard of it. It's just like normal matter, with all the same properties and all the same abilities to make up atoms and molecules, except for one crucial difference: It has an opposite charge. Take the humble electron, for example. Mass of 9.11 x 10^-31 kg. Quantum spin of 1/2. Charge of -1.6 x 10^-9 coulombs.

Something weird is happening in our galaxy: It’s spinning fast enough that stars ought to be flying off, but there’s something holding them together. The substance that acts as a gravitational glue is dark matter. Yet it’s incredibly mysterious: Because it doesn’t emit light, no one has ever directly seen it. And no one knows what it’s made of, though there are plenty of wild hypotheses.