Galaxies

A giant black hole may have hurled a star cluster toward us at record speed
 

The half-the-speed-of-light spin of a giant black hole suggests it grew by digesting another black hole in a galaxy merger. Clara Moskowitz reports 

The bonanza in spotting Pluto's peers nears its end

Small galaxies orbiting the Milky Way may have arrived via dark matter superhighways stretching across the universe

A trove of 715 planets—all members of multiworld systems—joins the list of Kepler's finds
 

The Hubble Telescope's new set of Frontier Fields images includes a galaxy some 13-billion light-years away, which makes it a candidate for the most distant object ever seen. Clara Moskowitz reports 

A disagreement between observations of galaxy clusters and the cosmic background radiation could be explained by the existence of a fourth type of neutrino
 

A puzzle from the big bang's echo is solved using the technique of gravitational lensing

Scientific American technology editor Seth Fletcher talks about the recent Consumer Electronics Show and astronomy editor Clara Moskowitz discusses last month's American Astronomical Society conference  

 

Able to detect light from the first stars just 380,000 years after the big bang, the Square Kilometer Array will be the world's biggest radio observatory and promises to spur science and economic development in Africa

Astronomers say it's the first direct imaging of the long-sought gas filaments stretching between galaxies

One of the nearest stellar explosions since 1987 could become visible in two weeks to skywatchers using binoculars