Astronomy stories

Scientists just found the biggest supermassive black hole ever

Matthew Jackson
Thursday, November 29, 2012 - 11:22am
Black holes are massive things. Supermassive black holes, found at the center of most spiral galaxies, are packed with hundreds of millions (if not billions) of times the mass of a star, yet they fit in relatively small spaces. The point is, they've all got lots of mass, but astronomers just found one that makes every other black hole ever seen look small.

How scientists lost a 5,000-year-old star for three years

Matthew Jackson
Tuesday, July 31, 2012 - 10:33am
Astronomy can be pretty tricky business. For one thing, all the stuff you're looking at is actually spread very far apart, and apparently sometimes a star will just flat out disappear on you. That's what happened to a team operating NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Telescope, who discovered a 5,000-year-old pulsar in 2009 only to then lose track of it for the next three years.

Pages