Yale astronomer Pieter van Dokkum and a team of researchers have discovered an object in space they call the "Infinity" galaxy—two recently-collided galaxies that, together, look like the symbol for infinity.

was caused by two black holes with masses of about 100 and 140 times that of the Sun merging to form a final black hole weighing in at some 225 solar masses. “It’s the most massive [merger] so far,” says Mark Hannam, a physicist at Cardiff University ...

But in the past two decades, new types of black holes have been seen and astronomers are beginning to understand how they form. Called supermassive black holes, they have been found at the center of pretty much every galaxy and are a hundred thousand to a billion times the mass of our sun.

A new method to analyze gravitational-wave data could transform how we study some of the universe's most extreme events—black holes smashing into each other.

A black hole jet from the Centaurus A galaxy is "hitting something along its path," that is baffling astronomers. The Chandra X-ray Telescop team takes you on a tour of the system. Credit: NASA/CXC/A.

In 2020, astronomers identified a nearby star system that appeared to contain something phenomenal: the closest black hole to Earth! Now, new research from some of those same astronomers suggests that they may have been deceived by a cosmic illusion.

Though our solar system and the movement of its planets appear relatively sedate, there are many things that could upset the balance. Anything with enough mass that got close enough could disrupt planetary orbits.

At cosmological scales, Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity has given scientists an immensely accurate blueprint for the workings of gravity and spacetime. Meanwhile, quantum mechanics has charted a path through the perplexing world of the subatomic, producing the standard model of particle physics.