Galaxies

Last year I got talking to theoretical physicist Aron Wall about the thermodynamics of quantum gravity. Now that's a deceptively beautiful phrase: in four words, you get three of the deepest areas in modern science.

One of the most fundamental but elusive constituents of the cosmos could soon be cornered
 

The detection of a runaway star may explain how a massive object turned into a dense, magnetic magnetar instead of collapsing into a black hole

The star cluster HVGC-1 had been part of the M87 galaxy, but now it's fleeing that galaxy at more than two million miles per hour. Clara Moskowitz reports

 

For the past year, astronomers around the world have been watching the center of the Milky Way in anticipation of a once-per-eon event. Right around now (or, technically, 24,000 years ago--that's roughly how far away the galactic center is in light years), a cloud of gas and dust plummeting toward our galaxy's supermassive black hole, [...]

Live streaming video by Ustream It doesn’t get much better than this (well, of course being in space might be better, albeit colder).

Data from the damaged spacecraft reveal new worlds

Astronomers hope that one day soon we’ll obtain a spectrum of light that might tell us whether or not an Earth-sized exoplanet harbors life.

As any avid Star Trek fan can tell you, the eccentric physicist Zefram Cochrane invented the warp-drive engine in the year 2063. It wasn't easy.

The Cherenkov Telescope Array will track high-energy photons to probe black holes, dark matter and relativity

The IceCube experiment has taken hits from three neutrinos carrying energies above the outlandishly high peta–electron volt range that suggest they may radiate from titanic explosions in the depths of space
 

Excess gamma-ray light at the galactic center may indicate invisible dark matter particles