Gauging the mass of a black hole is tricky, but astronomers have devised multiple methods to measure the heft of these ...

In a recent piece for my column The Universe, I wrote about the biggest black holes in the cosmos. Black holes are rather famous for being, well, black because they can gobble down even light itself.

An independent way of measuring mass in the universe is gravitational lensing. General relativity, our best theory of gravity, predicts that mass bends light. In gravitational lensing, light from a ...

In the 30 years since the discovery of 51 Pegasi b, more than 6,000 planets outside our Solar System have been catalogued. Two modern-day explorers explain how.

The James Webb Space Telescope's latest image shows eight spectacular examples of gravitational lensing, a phenomenon that ...

Some things we see in space appear to outpace light. Now we are learning to harness these bizarre optical illusions to ...

Exoplanet hunters Christopher Watson and Annelies Mortier explain the long search for a 'twin Earth' capable of sustaining ...

On Sept. 24, 2025, NASA launched two new missions to study the influence of the Sun on the solar system, with further ...

Once tied to a metal cylinder in France, the kilogram has now been redefined using the fundamental laws of physics.

On the night of Oct. 5, 1923, Edwin Hubble observed a strange star that flickered in intensity at regular intervals. The star ...

Earlier this week, the Sun unleashed a flurry of plasma and magnetic fields, or coronal mass ejection, at interstellar object ...