Black holes, dark matter, the edge of the universe—still-unsolved puzzles of the cosmos.
7 articles
Cygnus X-1 — humanity's first confirmed black hole — is firing a jet at half the speed of light. For the first time, astronomers have directly measured its power: the equivalent of 10,000 suns. Here's what 18 years of observations and a 'dancing jet' revealed.
At the center of galaxy J1007+3540, a black hole that had been dormant for 100 million years suddenly fired up a new jet. Radio telescopes captured something rare: ancient fossil plasma and a fresh new outburst in the same frame. Why do black holes go quiet — and what makes them wake up?
Set to launch in 2026, NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope has a field of view roughly 100 times wider than Hubble's — wide enough to capture five full moons in a single frame. From the mystery of dark energy to thousands of new exoplanets, Roman is poised to rewrite observational astronomy from the ground up.
Stars, galaxies, gas — everything we can observe makes up just 5% of the universe. The other 95% is something we can't see. Dark matter and dark energy sit at the heart of modern cosmology, and we still don't know what either of them is.
Two different methods for measuring how fast the universe is expanding keep giving different answers. A landmark April 2026 measurement has now ruled out measurement error as the explanation — and what's left is genuinely unsettling.
Two of the universe's most extreme objects collide — and the last few milliseconds of that encounter trace all the way back to the origin of gold and platinum. Gravitational waves have finally let us witness this cosmic clash up close.
Black holes trap even light—so how can we see a glowing ring around them? This explainer walks through the photon sphere, the EHT image of M87, and the gravitational lensing that turns the cosmos's darkest objects into its most spectacular portraits.