Technicians prepare Swift’s UVOT for vibration testing on Aug. 1, 2002, more than two years before launch, in the High Bay Clean Room at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
The Swift Observatory passed a milestone: 1 million snapshots of the universe. These exquisite and revealing pictures have captured the births and deaths of stars, gravitational waves and comets.
A detector buried under more than a mile of ice in Antarctica has detected a high-energy subatomic neutrino and traced it to its origin, a blazar – a gargantuan black hole more than a billion times more massive than the sun.
Nobody knows for sure where black holes lead to.
Shutterstock
The pull created by a black hole is so strong that if you get too close to one – even if you are travelling away from it at the fastest speed it is possible to go – you will never be able escape.
Artist conception of a tidal disruption event (TDE) that happens when a star passes fatally close to a supermassive black hole.
Sophia Dagnello, NRAO/AUI/NSF.
Eileen Meyer, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Astronomers are gathering an exponentially greater amount of data every day – so much that it will take years to uncover all the hidden signals buried in the archives.
Top-down artist depiction of a tiny black hole and a pileup of gas and matter swirling toward the center.
NASA
Stephen Hawking raised the public profile of grand science, and speculated about the future of artificial intelligence, as well as contacting aliens. Does science mix easily with science fiction?
The Milky Way seen in infrared.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/S. Stolovy (SSC/Caltech)
The famous cosmologist was closely identified with black holes due to his revolutionary theoretical work explaining some of their mysterious properties.
Stephen Hawking both warned about and benefited from artificial intelligence.
Hoo-Me.com/MediaPunch/IPX/AP
Despite his fears artificial intelligence might one day overtake humanity, Stephen Hawking knew from his own life how profoundly AI could improve humans’ daily lives.
Stephen Hawking inspired people with his work on black holes and other mysteries of the universe. Many were quick to pay tribute to the theoretical physicist who died today in the UK, aged 76.
Stephen Hawking at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge in 2015.
lwpkommunikacio/flickr
Michael Courts, The Conversation and Sarah Keenihan, The Conversation
Hawking’s most famous book, A Brief History of Time, sold 10 million copies and was translated into 40 languages, skyrocketing to the top of the bestseller lists in the US and UK.
Black holes may come in many sizes, but there’s still a gap in the middle. The hunt is on to solve the mystery of where are the intermediate size black holes.
Hawking proved that the Big Bang was physically possible.
Artist’s impression of the collision of two neutron stars, the source of the latest gravitational waves detected.
National Science Foundation/LIGO/Sonoma State University/A. Simonnet
Astronomers have finally confirmed the source of the latest detected gravitational waves was the collission of a pair of neutron stars, what they’d been searching for all along.
The Australia Telescope Compact Array in Narrabri, NSW.
David Smyth/CSIRO