Astronomers have discovered the first dormant black hole outside of the Milky Way. These black holes are not absorbing matter from a nearby star, making them incredibly hard to find.
Sagittarius A* is a massive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. Now that astronomers have imaged it, they can begin to learn more about black holes within other galaxies across the universe.
Ski jumpers use aerodynamics and physics to overcome gravity – at least for a while.
AP Photo/Matthias Schrader
It may look like athletes in bobsled, luge and skeleton simply grab a sled and hang on until the bottom, but high-speed physics and tiny motions mean the difference between gold and a crash.
The locations of 115 candidate free floating planets in the region between Upper Scorpius and Ophiuchus.
European Southern Observatory
Some planets are rejected by the Solar System that gave birth to them.
Some stars travel at high speeds through the universe and sometimes leave spectacular clouds of dust and gas in their wake.
NASA, ESA and R. Sahai (NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory)
Hypervelocity stars were discovered only 15 years ago and are the closest things in existence to real shooting stars. They travel at millions of miles per hour, so fast that they can escape from galaxies.
Experiments at the Large Hadron Collider in Europe, like the ATLAS calorimeter seen here, are providing more accurate measurements of fundamental particles.
Maximilien Brice
Physicists know a lot about the most fundamental properties of the universe, but they certainly don’t know everything. 2021 was a big year for physics – what was learned and what’s coming next?
An artist’s impression of the Double Pulsar system in which the two pulsars orbit each other every 2.5 hours and send out high-energy beams that sweep across the sky.
Image credit: John Rowe Animations/CSIRO
Such a mission could be developed soon, allowing astrophysicists to take selfies of the solar system and use the Sun’s gravity as a lens to peer deep into space.
The Earth is round.
Alistair Berg/DigitalVision via Getty Images
Gravity is something every person on Earth intuitively understands: It is what keeps you on the ground. But how come gravity pulls down, rather than pushes up? Einstein came up with the answer.
The reason bigger objects in space are round and smaller ones aren’t boils down to gravity. And it’s the same reason mountains on Earth can only grow to a certain height
The English astronomer and navigator Thomas Harriot died in 1621, leaving behind 8,000 pages of notes containing a trove of unpublished scientific discoveries.
Gravitational waves reveal the demise of super-dense neutron stars spiralling into their black hole companions - the first time such strange and exotic star systems have ever been observed.
The world’s biggest gravitational wave observatory is now probing the limits of quantum mechanics.
April’s super full moon was known as the pink moon because it heralds the arrival of spring flowers.
Mark Rightmire/MediaNews Group/Orange County Register via Getty Images
Sea level is still rising, and when that lunar cycle starts upward again, it will mean double trouble for places like Miami.
The sky can be so many different things: it can be big, beautiful and blue, or grey, cloudy and rainy. It can also be full of stars, or full of orange and red clouds at sunset or sunrise.
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