Astrophysics

A single subatomic particle from deep space had the same energy as a baseball pitch, and scientists still don’t know how it got here

Long ago, the cosmos might have been a black hole factory—and these primordial objects are even weirder than you think

This science-fiction movie plays with quantum physics, space travel, astrobiology and mass-to-energy conversion

Just how big can a star become? The answer depends on when in cosmic history you’re asking the question

A new data release more than doubles the number of gravitational-wave candidate events—and reveals unexpected complexities of merging black holes

Bizarre objects that seem to lack all dark matter present a cosmic mystery

Despite years of debate and follow-up studies, an odd streak of cosmic light still defies a final explanation. Is it a giant black hole screaming through intergalactic space?

A new study explains how some supernovae are particularly dazzling—the glow from a magnetic, spinning ball of neutrons called a magnetar. An assist from Einstein is what settled the case

A new catalog of gravitational waves more than doubles the known number of these spacetime ripples

Nebula PMR 1 looks uncannily similar to an electrified brain inside a semitransparent skull

Asteroids, exploding stars, and feasting black holes swarm in the first-ever batch of nightly alerts from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile

The collision of supermassive black holes shakes the entire cosmos, hard