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
Chinese researchers may have discovered billions of tons of water inside strange glass spheres buried on the moon, and they could be used as a future water source for moon bases, a new study suggests. The tiny glass spherules, collected in lunar soil samples and brought to Earth by China’s Chang’e-5 mission in December 2020, … Read more
An enormous “solar tornado” the size of 14 Earths stacked on top of each other recently raged on the sun’s surface for three whole days. The enormous plasma twister may be one of the largest ever recorded. The solar tornado emerged near the sun’s north pole on March 15 and continued to grow and shape-shift … 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
Planetary scientists have found groundbreaking evidence of recent volcanic activity on Venus. Archives from NASA’s Magellan mission show telltale signs that Maat Mons, a 5-mile-high (8 kilometers) volcano on Earth’s hellish twin, was active in 1991. Magellan, launched in May 1989, was the first spacecraft to map the entire surface of Venus. The mission’s radar … Read more
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has captured a dazzling image of a star about to go supernova in a massive explosion. The picture, released by NASA on Tuesday (March 14), shows the star WR 124 in the middle of a spectacular cosmic cloud. As it goes supernova, the star, which is about 30 solar … Read more
The moon crashing into Earth may sound like an unrealistic doomsday scenario or the stuff of sci-fi disasters. But for some planets in other star systems, such catastrophic collisions may be common. New research published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society uses computer simulations to show that collisions between exoplanets and … Read more
Glimpsed only occasionally at the hearts of massive clusters of galaxies, ultramassive black holes are some of the largest and most elusive objects in the universe. These black hole behemoths have masses exceeding that of 10 billion suns, making them far more monstrous than even the supermassive black holes found at the centers of galaxies … Read more
The shredded remnants of the first supernova ever recorded by humans — which appeared in the sky more than 1,800 years ago and vanished within eight months — rise from the cosmic grave in a stunning new image from the National Science Foundation’s NOIRLab. Tinged blood red and swirling around an invisible center of mass, … Read more
For the first time, astronomers have spotted enormous, galaxy-scale shock waves rattling the “cosmic web” that connects nearly all known galaxies. These cosmic waves could reveal clues about how the largest objects in the universe were sculpted. The discovery was made by stitching and stacking thousands of radio telescope images together, which revealed the soft … Read more
