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astrophysics

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Magellan Baade telescope and CMB illustration
astrophysics

Earliest Black Hole Gives Rare Glimpse of Ancient Universe

By Joshua Sokol
December 6, 2017
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It weighs as much as 780 million suns and helped to cast off the cosmic Dark Ages. But now that astronomers have found the earliest known black hole, they wonder: How could this giant have grown so big, so fast?

Plunge Into A (Virtual Reality) Black Hole
Multimedia

Plunge Into a (Virtual Reality) Black Hole

By Natalie Wolchover
December 4, 2017
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Join a fleet of robotic probes on a one-way virtual-reality trip into the abyss of a massive black hole.

An artist’s conception of the Vela Supercluster peeking out from behind the Milky Way’s Zone of Avoidance.
astrophysics

Hidden Supercluster Could Solve Milky Way Mystery

By Liz Kruesi
November 21, 2017
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Astronomers generally stay away from the “Zone of Avoidance.” When one astronomer didn’t, she found a giant cosmic structure that could help explain why our galaxy moves so fast.

A projection showing how the positions of some 2 million stars measured by the Gaia satellite are expected to evolve in the future.
Abstractions blog

Deathblow Dealt to Dark Matter Disks

By Natalie Wolchover
November 17, 2017
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New data tracking the movements of millions of Milky Way stars have effectively ruled out the presence of a “dark disk” that could have offered important clues to the mystery of dark matter.

An artist’s view of a pulsar near the center of the Messier 82 galaxy.
astrophysics

Galactic Glow, Thought to Be Dark Matter, Now Hints at Hidden Pulsars

By Katia Moskvitch
November 14, 2017
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A number of high-energy anomalies raised hopes that astrophysicists had seen their first direct glimpses of dark matter. New studies suggest a different source may be responsible.

‘Crazy’ Supernova Looks Like a New Kind of Star Death
astrophysics

‘Crazy’ Supernova Looks Like a New Kind of Star Death

By Natalie Wolchover
November 8, 2017
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Astronomers are mystified by a strange star explosion in a distant galaxy that might be a relic from an earlier cosmological era.

Zoomable Universe - rectangular thumbnail
Multimedia

From the Edge of the Universe to the Inside of a Proton

By Natalie Wolchover +1 authors
Olena Shmahalo
November 6, 2017
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The Zoomable Universe, a new book by the astrobiologist Caleb Scharf, the illustrator Ron Miller and 5W Infographics, tours the universe’s 62 orders of magnitude.

astrophysics

Squishy or Solid? A Neutron Star’s Insides Open to Debate

By Joshua Sokol
October 30, 2017
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The core of a neutron star is such an extreme environment that physicists can’t agree on what happens inside. But a new space-based experiment — and a few more colliding neutron stars — should reveal whether neutrons themselves break down.

Artist’s rendering of merging neutron stars.
cosmology

Colliding Neutron Stars Could Settle the Biggest Debate in Cosmology

By Natalie Wolchover
October 25, 2017
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Newly discovered “standard sirens” provide an independent, clean way to measure how fast the universe is expanding.


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