Walkabout the Galaxy

What do you call a very-but-not-so-supermassive black hole completely encased in a warm dense cloud of hydrogen? A hot mess? How about "black hole star", a new category of crazy astronomical object that can explain some...

Strange and Top are at it again with a deep dive on the physics, psychology, and philosophy of the big questions: is there technologically advanced life out there in the galaxy, and if so, we will ever know? Will we...

Supermassive have such voracious appetites that they create an energetic mess when eating which has a tendency to shoot their food off at very high speeds. New observations show the second course for these monsters as...

Quasars, the energetic engines driven by the voracious appetite of supermassive black holes, have been observed in the very early universe, upending ideas about how long it took to form these behemoths in the first...

The astroquarks examine the oft-asked question of why the Moon sometimes looks huge and other times, not so much, and we take a look at the cool mission to grapple and boost the NASA Swift space telescope into a higher...

OG Top Quark Tracy Becker joins us with an update on water plumes from Jupiter's moon Europa, plus intriguing new data of interstellar comet 3I shows it is even older than we thought, with an age approaching that of the...

Exquisitely detailed measurements of the ripples in spacetime from the mergers of black holes now show that some of these merging black holes were, themselves, created by an earlier black hole merging event. While this...

<p>Exquisitely detailed measurements of the ripples in spacetime from the mergers of black holes now show that some of these merging black holes were, themselves, created by an earlier black hole merging event. While...

<p>Mysterious bright blue flashes from relatively empty parts of the universe have a new possible explanation involving, what else, black holes. We explore this new idea to explain Luminous Fast Blue Optical Transients...

<p>A Plutino, an object that shares Pluto's orbit but which is much smaller than Pluto, appears to have a very thin global atmosphere. We discuss the detection and how such a small body could hold onto even a thin...

<p>Gravitational waves and light combine to reveal what is suspected to be a superkilonova which is much cooler than the name suggests. Cool in the cool way, not the temperature way. Learn about splitting neutron stars...

<p>Gravitational Wave observatory LIGO has seen a signature that looks like the merger of primordial (pre-stellar, big bang (not big band!) era) black holes. If confirmed with future observations, this would tell us a...

<p>Supermassive black holes can be terrible neighbors. New research shows that their powerful jets of charged particles can shut down star formation in neighboring galaxies within the galaxy cluster, which is just plain...

<p>The Earth spent some crazy amounts of time (tens of millions of years) completely frozen over. And not, in the grand scheme of things, all that long ago. New research shows the ocean was salty and super-cold. How did...

<p>There's always been a fuzzy line between asteroids and comets, and new observations of asteroids in the vicinity of Jupiter provide a hint to the origin of the mysterious active asteroids that look like asteroids but...