Black Holes
How Astronomers Finally Captured a Photo of our Own Galaxy’s Black Hole
It took hundreds of researchers and many telescopes to capture an image of the black hole at the middle of our Milky Way.
Stories by Seth Fletcher
Black Holes
The Black Hole in the Middle of our Galaxy Looks like This
It took hundreds of researchers and many telescopes to capture an image of the black hole at the middle of our Milky Way.
Black Holes
The First Picture of the Black Hole at the Milky Way’s Heart Has Been Revealed
The historic image of Sagittarius A* is the culmination of a decades-long astronomical quest—and a crucial step toward a new understanding of black holes, gravity and spacetime...
Behavior
Truth, Lies & Uncertainty
Searching for reality in unreal times
Space & Physics
How the Black Hole Said Cheese
Scientific American 's chief features editor Seth Fletcher talks about his book Einstein's Shadow, an account of the long effort to image a black hole that recently came to fruition...
Black Holes
An Exit Chute from the Universe: The Story of a Historic Effort to Image a Black Hole
After more than a decade of effort, a global network of radio telescopes revealed the first-ever picture of an enigmatic hole in spacetime
Space & Physics
Clear Skies, with a Chance of Black Holes
The Event Horizon Telescope’s historic quest to image the “shadow” of a supermassive black hole is off to an auspicious start
Space & Physics
Astronomers Will Try to Take the First Picture of a Black Hole Next Year
If we survive the election, naturally
Culture
A Trippy Cosmic History Lesson: SA Editors Discuss Terrence Malick’s “Voyage of Time”
Part science documentary, part meditation on the meaning of life, director Terrence Malik’s (“The Tree of Life,” “The Thin Red Line”) new IMAX movie “Voyage of Time” is hard to categorize...
Space & Physics
Backstage for the Discovery of Gravitational Waves: An Interview with Janna Levin
The astrophysicist and author talks about her new book, Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space
Policy
From AI to Zika: AAAS Conference Highlights
Scientific American editors Mark Fischetti, Dina Maron and Seth Fletcher talk about the info they picked up at the just-concluded annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C...
The Sciences
Why You Should Be Excited about This Week's Big LIGO Announcement
It could mark the birth of a new kind of astronomy
The Sciences
Stephen Hawking's New Black-Hole Paper, Translated: An Interview with Co-Author Andrew Strominger
The Harvard physicist explains the collaboration's long-awaited research on the black-hole information paradox
The Sciences
Confirmed: Black Holes are Magnetism-Powered Eating Machines
The long list of unanswered questions about black holes contains one particularly surprising item: How do they eat? Unlike many of the riddles that black holes pose, this one seems so simple: What do you mean we don’t know how things fall into a black hole?...
Technology
Injectable Probes Could Transform Brain Monitoring
Conductive polymer mesh could be a boon to brain research
The Sciences
Why Colliding Galaxies Never Go out of Style
The first theory proposed to explain the universe's strangest galaxies has had impressive staying power
Environment
Climate Chatter Dominates Island of Nobels
During a historic European heat wave, 36 Nobel laureates signed a declaration on climate change—and tried to shout down the science-denying claims of one of their own
Fitness
How Precision Medicine Will Transform Cancer Treatment
Nobelist Harold Varmus on the promise of a new generation of cancer treatments—and the big challenges that remain
Technology
Rocket Fuel: Firing the Space Launch System's Engines [Video]
Controversy aside, work on NASA’s next deep-space rocket continues unabated
Space & Physics
Finding "Fringes": New Event Horizon Telescope Detections Start Trickling In
The technique that the astronomers of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) use to observe black holes is called Very Long Baseline Interferometry, or VLBI, but it might as well be called Extremely Delayed Gratification Astronomy: it can take weeks or months after an observing run to find out whether the telescope array actually saw anything...
