For decades, astronomers have used distant supernovae as cosmic lighthouses to test fundamental physics and to measure the ...

Planets orbiting dead stars known as white dwarfs might be able to remain habitable thanks to general relativity subtly altering their motion. When stars like our sun run out of fuel, they expand and ...

For those who watch gravitational waves roll in from the universe, GW250114 is a big one. It's the clearest gravitational wave signal from a binary black hole merger to date, and it gives researchers ...

In December 2024, astronomers watched a star around 25 times the mass of our sun die in a blaze of glory. Located one billion light-years from Earth, SN 2024afav was a prime example of a superluminous ...

Astronomers have found thousands of exoplanets around single stars, but few around binary stars—even though both types of stars are equally common. Physicists can now explain the dearth. Of the more ...

Recent advancements in observational techniques have led to the capture of high-resolution images of black hole shadows, which are challenging the completeness of Einstein’s general theory of ...

Two recently observed black hole mergers, occurring just weeks apart in late 2024, have opened an extraordinary new window into the universe’s most extreme events. These collisions not only revealed ...