Astronomy

If you happen to have an uncharged black hole handy, you may be able to power your house with it. Just set it spinning. But since most of us won't, it’s a little hard to test. That is, until these researchers found a way to do it in the lab.

In April 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration made history with the first-ever image of a black hole – an object that, until then, had never been directly observed by humanity. Turns out that was just the beginning of breakthroughs.

Is life really out there? A team of scientists from the University of California, Riverside, has devised a new statistical method that could serve as more than a cosmic thought experiment, potentially providing answers to the age-old question.

For the first time, astronomers claim they’ve found a way to reconstruct a galaxy’s entire ‘life story’ – from a single snapshot in time.

Why did the ice ages occur? If you need a scapegoat, a new study by Stephen Kane of UC Riverside suggests pointing the finger at Mars. According to computer models, the pull of the Red Planet may have altered the Earth's orbit until things got nippy.

Did you know it rains on the Sun? Not water, of course. It's solar rain, which occurs in the Sun's corona, the outermost layer composed of intensely hot plasma. Astronomers have finally figured out the science behind this strange phenomenon.

After decades of planning and building, the world's largest digital camera at the heart of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory on the summit of Cerro Pachón in Chile has snapped its first imagery – from test observations spanning a 10-hour window.

A new collaborative project dubbed the COSMOS-Web field has compiled the most comprehensive cosmic map ever, including images of the early universe as far back as 13.5 billion years.

If you've been wondering how long the day on Uranus is, you probably need to get out more. But if you have, you'll be interested to know that observations by the Hubble Space Telescope have shown that it's 28 seconds longer than previously thought.

Finding alien life won’t be a flying saucer landing at the White House – NASA scientists will hold a press conference to excitedly show off a chart that’s incomprehensible to most people. Now we’re a step closer to that boring but groundbreaking day.

Astronomers have detected mysterious X-ray signals coming from a nearby white dwarf star for more than 40 years. We may now know where they’re coming from – the death throes of a planet being torn to shreds and raining down on the star.

Astrophysicists have done a bit of crime scene investigation. They’ve traced radioactive elements on the seafloor back to the cosmic explosions they might have come from – and potentially linked the event to evolutionary changes in viruses in Africa.