Astronomers have discovered one of the largest black holes ever found — an ultramassive monster roughly 30 billion times the mass of the sun — using a space-time trick predicted by Albert Einstein. The colossal black hole, which lurks 2.7 billion light-years from Earth in the brightest galaxy of the galaxy cluster Abell 1201, was … Read more
The universe could, in fact, be a giant doughnut, despite all of the evidence suggesting it’s as flat as a pancake, new research suggests. Strange patterns found in echoes of the Big Bang could be explained by a universe with a more complicated shape, and astronomers have not fully tested the universe’s flatness, the study … Read more
Researchers have finally pinpointed the likely origin of mysterious heartbeat-like signals spat out by the sun during solar flares. The findings could help us learn more about how potentially damaging solar storms are unleashed, a new study shows. Solar radio bursts are streams of electromagnetic radiation — made up mainly of radio waves, as well … Read more
The first stars in the cosmos may have topped out at over 10,000 times the mass of the sun, roughly 1,000 times bigger than the biggest stars alive today, a new study has found. Nowadays, the biggest stars are 100 solar masses. But the early universe was a far more exotic place, filled with mega-giant … Read more
Ripples in space-time known as gravitational waves could help reveal the secrets at the dawn of time, just moments after the Big Bang, new research suggests. And physicists say they can learn more about these primeval gravitational waves using nuclear fusion reactors here on Earth. In a new study, physicists used equations that govern how … Read more
An elusive object in space has posed a riddle for scientists. It looks like a black hole. It acts like a black hole. It may even smell like a black hole. But it has one crucial difference: It has no event horizon, meaning that you can escape its gravitational clutches if you try hard enough. … Read more
It’s the stuff of science fiction — parallel worlds that fan out in time and space. But do such parallel worlds exist? It turns out that at least some physics theories do allow for the existence of parallel universes — at least on the quantum level. In several interpretations of quantum mechanics, like the Many-Worlds … Read more
One of the most perplexing aspects of quantum mechanics is that tiny subatomic particles don’t seem to “choose” a state until an outside observer measures it. The act of measurement converts all the vague possibilities of what could happen into a definite, concrete outcome. While the mathematics of quantum mechanics provides rules for how that … Read more
Physicists have used a quantum computer to simulate the first-ever holographic wormhole and transport information through it. The “baby” wormhole, created on Google’s Sycamore 2 quantum computer was not created with gravity, but through quantum entanglement — the linking of two particles such that measuring one instantaneously affects the other. By entangling qubits, or quantum … Read more
Astronomers estimate that roughly 85% of all the matter in the universe is dark matter, meaning only 15% of all matter is normal matter. Accounting for dark energy, the name astronomers give to the accelerated expansion of the universe, dark matter makes up roughly 27% of all the mass energy in the cosmos, according to … Read more
