The supermassive black hole at the heart of M87 was the target of the Event Horizon Telescope, revealing the area around its event horizon for the first time. Although an accretion disk surrounded the black hole, astronomers weren't sure if the black hole itself was rotating. They imaged the region with radio telescopes and discovered the remnants of polar jets, showing that the black hole's rotation axis had undergone precession over time. This precession indicates that the black hole is rotating; they're just not sure how quickly yet.

Technicians at Berkeley Lab are building an experiment that will conduct radio astronomy on the far side of the Moon starting in 2025!

Barnard's Star is the second closest star system to Earth, at a distance of 5.96 light-years. It's another red dwarf system well positioned close to the celestial equator. Astronomers have observed Barnard's Star with the 500-meter FAST radio telescope, scanning for any signals from an advanced civilization.

How massive is the Milky Way? According to a new study using data from ESA's Gaia spacecraft, less than we thought. A new estimate puts the Milky Way's mass at 200 billion times the mass of the Sun, which is 4-5 times less than previous estimates that pegged it closer to a trillion solar masses. Using detailed information about millions of stars, astronomers were able to build an extremely accurate rotation curve for the Milky Way and use that to estimate its mass. They found that the rotation of the Milky Way isn't typical for large spiral galaxies, decreasing its estimated mass.

Since the discovery of antimatter decades ago, particle physicists have wondered if these particles were repulsed by gravity. Einstein predicted that despite having opposite charges to its regular matter counterparts, antimatter should still behave like matter does concerning gravity. This has been tricky to confirm experimentally since it's hard to make enough antimatter to observe its behavior. Particle physicists have finally pulled it off, using the ALPHA-g experiment at CERN, generating antihydrogen atoms and then dropping them in a 3-meter tall vertical shaft.

A new study shows how existing observatories like the ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) can be upgraded to perform cutting-edge astronomy

Astronomers still don't know what dark matter is, but one of its characteristics is that it has a small "cross section," which means that it doesn't interact with regular matter or itself. However, if it's possible to trap dark matter in a region dense enough, it might interact and annihilate, releasing gamma radiation. A new paper suggests that astronomers use gamma-ray observatories to scan white dwarf stars to discover whether there's an excess of radiation coming from them. This might mean there's dark matter trapped inside, providing more clues to its nature.

A new study estimates that there could be 11,000 habitable planets within 100 parsecs of our Sun, the nearest being 20 parsecs away.

NASA teams have started the intricate process of removing the samples of asteroid Bennu from their canister.