They start as quiet monsters, swallowing light and time, and end as the most honest questions in physics. For decades, black holes were places where our equations went to hide; now they’re where we go looking for answers. New observations of early, oversized black holes and crisp gravitational-wave signals have forced scientists to rethink what ...
Astronomers were confused when the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) first saw strange, free-floating pairs of Jupiter-sized objects in 2023. These strange cosmic objects, called “JuMBOs” (Jupiter-mass binary objects), seemed to go against the usual ideas about how planets form because they didn’t have a parent star and were drifting through space in tight gravitational ...
A cosmic leviathan stirs across the great, quiet expanse of the early universe. About 12 billion years old, a supermassive black hole has unleashed a jet of energy so strong it defies understanding illuminated not by starlight but by the fading echo of the Big Bang itself. Three times the width of our Milky Way, ...
